Euglena, a protozoan that encysts to avoid environmental extremes, has two kinds of cysts.
Mammals may react to environmental extremes with acclimatization, compensatory behaviour, or physiological specialization.
The same is true for making robotic components tough enough to withstand environmental extremes, such as widely varying temperatures, he said.
Free-living protozoans form cysts around themselves and avoid environmental extremes, but cysts are a part of the life cycle of parasitic protozoans.
With environmental extremes as pronounced as they are in the Arctic and with the number of species so limited, there are often considerable oscillations in animal populations.
Grasses have adapted to the full range of environmental extremes occupied by plants, from the coldest regions and highest elevations where plants grow to equatorial heat, and from fully aquatic habitats to deserts.
Knowledge of the Earth's deep biosphere and how it survives such environmental extremes could also help astrobiologists searching for life on Mars, where the planetary surface is known to be hostile for living organisms.
Most medications can be susceptible to losing some of their potency when exposed to environmental extremes, though the extent varies from one to the next, said Lee Cantrell, a professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco.
Prolonged droughts or environmental extremes can be disastrous to the livestock.
Susceptibility is increased through socioeconomic impoverishment caused by the environmental extremes.
Clearly, without technology and science, the environmental extremes to which we are now exposed would probably not be realized.
