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Crashed spacecraft may have left creatures on the moon
Thousands of tardigrades—also known as ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets’—were on board the Beresheet spacecraft when it crash landed on the moon in April.
(CNN)You’ve heard of men on the moon — but what about moss piglets?
Thousands of tardigrades – also known as “water bears” or “moss piglets” — were on board the Beresheet spacecraft when it crash landed on the moon in April.
The tiny creatures are incredibly hardy and can survive extremely low temperatures and harsh conditions– and The Arch Mission Foundation, which sent them into space, believes some may have survived.
Tardigrades are pudgy little animals no longer than one millimeter. They live in water or in the film of water on plants like lichen or moss, and can be found all over the world in some of the most extreme environments, from icy mountains and polar regions to the balmy equator and the depths of the sea.
Tardigrades live all over the world in some of the most extreme environments.
In an attempt to create a “Noah’s ark” or a “back-up” for the Earth, non-profit organization The Arch Mission sent a lunar library — a stack of DVD-sized disks that acts as an archive of 30 million pages of information about the planet — to the moon. Along with the library, Arch Mission sent human DNA samples and a payload of tardigrades, which had been dehydrated, into space.
“We chose them because they are special. They are the toughest form of life we know of. They can survive practically any planetary cataclysm. They can survive in the vacuum of space, they can survive radiation,” Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, told CNN.
Tardigrades have eight legs with claws at the end, a brain and central nervous system, and a sucker-like pharynx behind their mouth, which can pierce food.
The Arch Mission put the creatures into a state of “suspended animation,” where the body dries out and the metabolism slows to as little as 0.01% of its normal rate.
The Arch Mission also sent a 30 million-page library along for the ride.
“In that state you can later rehydrate them in a laboratory and they will wake up and be alive again,” Spivack explained.
Although the animals won’t be able to reproduce or move around in their dehydrated state — if they have survived the crash — if rehydrated they could come back to life years later.
“We don’t often get a chance to land life on the moon that we decided to seize the day and send some along for the ride,” Spivack added.
Researchers hope that along with the tardigrades, the majority of the information from the lunar library survived the impact of the crash — and could be used to regenerate human life in millions of years.
“Best-case scenario is that the little library is fully intact, sitting on a nice sandy hillside on the moon for a billion years. In the distant future it might be recovered by our descendants or by a future form of intelligent life that might evolve long after we’re gone,” Spivack said.
“From the DNA and the cells that we included, you could clone us and regenerate the human race and other plants and animals,” he added.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/07/world/water-bear-space-intl-scli-scn/index.html
Inside DeepMind’s epic mission to solve science’s trickiest problem
For DeepMind, the emergence of the new headquarters is symbolic of a new chapter for the company as it turns its research heft and compute power to try to understand, among other things, the building blocks of organic life. In so doing, the company hopes to make breakthroughs in medicine and other disciplines that will significantly impact progress in a number of fields. “Our mission should be one of the most fascinating journeys in science,” Hassabis says. “We’re trying to build a cathedral to scientific endeavour.”
DeepMind’s AI has beaten chess grandmasters and Go champions. But founder and CEO Demis Hassabis now has his sights set on bigger, real-world problems that could change lives. First up: protein folding.
A Decades-Old Computer Science Puzzle Was Solved in Two Pages
A paper posted online this month has settled a nearly 30-year-old conjecture about the structure of the fundamental building blocks of computer circuits. This “sensitivity” conjecture has stumped many of the most prominent computer scientists over the years, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a https://twitter.com/BooleanAnalysis/status/1145837576487612416
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“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science,” he added in an email.
The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them “the bricks and mortar of whatever you’re doing in computer science,” said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.
New video from our 2019 Undoing Aging conference: Mikhail Shchepinov, Chief Science Officer at Retrotope, Inc., on aging and diseases resulting from the gradual accumulation of oxidative damages. undoing-aging.org/videos/mikhail-shchepinov-presenting-at-undoing-aging-2019 ____________
New video from our 2019 Undoing Aging conference: Mikhail Shchepinov, Chief Science Officer at Retrotope, Inc., on aging and diseases resulting from the gradual accumulation of oxidative damages.
undoing-aging.org/videos/mikhail-shchepinov-presenting-at-undoing-aging-2019
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Carl Sagan’s most important lesson about science
Click on photo to start video.
The thing that Carl Sagan did better than anybody else was connecting to the science through emotion and stories, says NASA’s Michelle Thaller. Watching him when growing up formed Thaller’s vision of what an astronomer could be and inspired her for the rest of her life.