Two exciting science-y things happened this week.
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ONE: Wired reported the findings of a study in the journal Current Biology in which some scientists shot tardigrades, aka water bears (which are a kind of invertebrate animal), out into space, exposing them to radiation, and they survived. If you wanted, you could easily see one without a microscope. They can slow their metabolisms by a factor of 10,000 (the article says) which allows them to survive vacuums, starvation, total disappearanence of water, and extreme temperatures (above 300F and below -240F).
Not only did they survive, one group was able to repair the DNA damaged by the radiation and reproduce at the same rate as the control group, making normal little water bear babies. Amazing. Seriously awesome. Now that we know that these tiny creatures can survive in space, scientists can start to figure out some stuff, like improving human DNA repair (e.g., aging much more slowly) and adapting to space.
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TWO: Yesterday, international scientists turned on the Large Hadron Collider and shot its first beam of protons, which traveled the entire 17-mile track. In a few weeks, they'll shoot lots and lots of beams, at which point atoms will begin to smash into each other, creating particles and possibly subparticles. This thing is incredible. It can generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than our sun.
The importance of the Large Hadron Collider cannot be underestimated. They'll be able to test such ideas as the Big Bang Theory, String Theory, the Multiverse Theory, and the Dark Matter Theory. The scientists who have been working on this thing say that the worst-case scenario is that they'll find out nothing, a waste of roughly 7,000 scientists from 20 countries at the cost of about $10 billion. Which isn't too bad, I guess, considering that the cost is still less than we spend in Iraq each month. (Data source: Congressional Research Service, as of 2/2/2008)
One of the worst case scenarios, floated by "crackpots," (i.e., physicists who aren't down with Einstein), is that the Large Hadron Collider could create a Large Black Hole. No more student loan debts!
Britain's Astronomer Royal put the odds of the Large Hadron Collider destroying the earth at 1 in 50 million. An analogy: if my math's right, if everyone in the world (6.6 billion) participated in a lottery, and the lottery money had to be equally divided among all of the winners, 36,000 people would walk away with some cash. And then blip out of existence.
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