The protagonists of the Crysis videogame series wear a “nanosuit”, which allows them to temporarily shield themselves in tough armour. In real life, humans have no such suits, but insects do. Japanese scientists have found a way of bestowing insects with a coat of armour that would allow them to survive the kind of empty vacuum they would encounter in space. And they’re calling it a nanosuit too.

Insects are unlikely to encounter vacuums in the wild, but in a lab, it’s another story. Vacuums are a standard part of ‘scanning electron microscopes’, which scientists use to capture jaw-dropping images of extremely small animals. The microscopes bombard the subjects with a focused beam of electrons and analyse how the