Super Natural by Alex Riley: Boil it, drown it, nuke it – but you can’t kill it
SUPER NATURE: How life develops by Alex Riley (Atlantic Books £ 22, 368PP)
A small animal called Tartigrade was first defined in 1861 and ‘a small animal in the form of a baby. . . A very funny fun man ‘. It was also called ‘Water Bears’ and ‘Moss Pig Puppies’.
In this bright new book, Alex Riley is really surprising, ‘such a soft and microscopic cute animal will be very difficult’.
Minutes but strong tardigrade
They can survive at a height of 6,000 meters above sea level and survive boiling water for half an hour. For humans, the deadly dose can withstand 1,000 times 1,000 atmosphere and radiation. Oh, and they are good to get fired into space and get rid of the space gap and the sun and galactic radiation with aplomb.
It seems to be the ability to dehydrate secrets, but survive. In this case they do not age.
Tardigrades is a main reason why scientists think that the total sterilization of the world would be impossible. A team from Oxford and Harvard, when life starts on a planet, ‘will continue.’
There are fish living under freezing at 2C, mushrooms in the Chernobyl reactor and turtles that do not need to breathe for six months.
Riley is good in drawing cows at the forefront of the research. Supposedly, mammal hibernation experts, now joy, after years of close work after the ‘living nonsense’ confessed. It is as if we learn nature, the more we don’t understand.
BAR -headed geese survived in very few oxygen migrate on Himalayas thanks to bright adaptations in blood cells and lungs, impossible 8,000 meters. Before the Himalayas came there, the goose has been likely to fly this route for more than 50 million years.
Another lesson from nature is the creation of destruction. Two billion years ago, photosynthetic bacteria almost destroyed the world when they began to burn oxygen, which is a very rare gas in our atmosphere. Nevertheless, after a great death, new life forms emerged to benefit from this source.
About 440 million years ago, the trees quickly colonized the old super continent of Pangea, and in the process, the Mega Ton Co2 sucked, so that suddenly ‘turned into an ice world’. 85 percent of all species are extinct.
Today, the Chernobyl disaster has a sober lesson. Nature develops and multiplies here because people are separated. Nature really doesn’t mind radiation; People can’t deal with people.
James Lovelock from the Gaia Theory suggested that the best way to protect tropical rainforests would be to pour radioactive wastes ‘excluding people’.
Riley gets comfort in the flexibility of nature. Although irregular climate change and biodiversity collapses, none of them can threaten us, but cannot really threaten life in the world. Tardigrades will continue to turn into new and unimaginable lifestyles.
