[Narrator] A band called Queen once asked

Who wants to live forever?

To which a tiny gelatinous critter called a hydra said,

Me, please.

This critter may just be immortal.

If it loses one of its tentacles it uses to snag food,

it'll grow right back.

Chop a hydra in two,

and you'll get two hydra.

Take one hundred hydra,

break them down into individual cells,

and mix those cells together.

Amazingly, the mass will form into a ball

and spawn fully-formed hydra.

So what can kill a hydra?

Well, not much short of fire or getting eaten.

A scientist once isolated 60 of them in sealed chambers.

After one year,

two,

three,

four years,

they still looked good as new.

That's a suspiciously long time for such a tiny animal,

because the smaller you are,

typically the shorter your lifespan.

But the hydra seems to have a cheat.

It sheds all of its cells

and builds its body from scratch every couple weeks.

It's basically reborn time and time again.

And if that isn't inspirational,

I don't know what is.

Now, somebody cut this hydra in two.