Al Khudary

It's one small step for Tardigrada, and one giant leap for the animal kingdom: The toughest creature on Earth has survived a trip into space.

Except for a few hardy strains of bacteria, any other creature would have been destroyed -- but tardigrades handled the voyage as though it were a dry spell on their local moss patch.

"They have claws and eyes. They are real animals. And this is the first time such an animal was tested in space," said Petra Rettberg, an Institute of Aerospace Medicine microbiologist.

Better known as water bears, tardigrades are eight-legged invertebrates visible to the naked eye and found throughout the world, making them a biology class favorite.

They're capable of halting their metabolisms during times of extreme privation, and can repair DNA damage caused by extraordinary doses of radiation -- a phenomenon that's piqued scientific curiosity and prompted researchers to shoot tardigrades into naked orbit around the Earth.

"The repair -- how fast, how efficient, with or without errors -- is different, but basic damage is the same," said Rettberg, who helped design a tardigrade containment system attached to the Foton-M3 satellite, launched last September by a consortium of national space agencies.

Our universe is perfectly tailored for life. That may be the work of God or the result of our universe being one of many.

by Tim Folger

published online November 10, 2008 - Discover Magazine.com

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi­verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

physical laws clamor for life: the universe knew we were coming.

“For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility,” Linde says. “You might say, ‘Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence. Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.’ Well, I don’t know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations.”

Last Friday the Medcalf Gallery in London debuted “Flooded London”, a photographic depiction of the future of London as it is overtaken by the rising sea. On Monday, exactly 20 years after warning us about global warming, NASA scientist James Hansen told congress that time’s up and he warned of such apocalyptic consequences.

Part of the London Architecture Festival, the “Flooded London” exhibition by the Squint/Opera media house is a prophetic rendering of London in the year 2090 and the effects of global climate change, an issue that has permeated the public’s consciousness over the last 20 years. That awareness is in large part thanks to Hansen, who is trumpeted by many as the “Global Warming Prophet” for his 1988 testimony before congress where he warned that global warming is real, it is here and it is manmade.

“Flooded London” depicts what life would be like in London years after the catastrophic rising sea ravaged the landscape. The stunning images actually show an almost utopian world where these people peacefully go about their daily lives in their new watery home. One picture shows two people fishing out of the side of a high rise building at Canary Wharf (above). Another shows a man about to dive off the ledge of the whispering gallery in St. Paul’s Cathedral, into the dimly lit pool. Yet another shows two men in a work shop fashioning together old bike and engine parts to make an electrical generator. The series seems to be as much about mankind’s resilience as it is about impending consequences yet when you listen to Hansen’s warnings it is hard to imagine bouncing back from the global cataclysm that Hansen predicts if we don’t act now. He cautions, “We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path.”

Electric_treex A new sensor system is under development that runs on electricity generated by ordinary trees! Apparently trees are capable of self-sustaining a reliable source of electricity. While a tree may not seem like much of a powerhouse, the "trickle charge" can add up, "just like a dripping faucet can fill a bucket over time," said Shuguang Zhang, one of the researchers on the project and the associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBE).
MIT researchers now believe they can power a network of sensors connected directly to trees to perform a variety of tasks.

Trees could serve as “silent sentinels” along the nation's borders to detect potential threats such as smuggled radioactive materials—with the sensors powered by the trees themselves. They could also prevent forest fires, among other applications, by sending early reports to the authorities.

Right now, the U.S. Forest Service says that manually recharging or replacing batteries in remote automated weather stations, which usually have to be located in hard-to-reach places, makes things impractical and costly. The new sensor system would bypass this problem by tapping into trees as it’s very own self-sustaining power supply. Each sensor is equipped with an off-the-shelf battery that can be slowly recharged using electricity generated by the tree itself.