Mid-morning. In a short time you will be
meeting with Zach at Kidd's Coffee. You checked and have 660 words on your
first draft of Pouch 21 and you are feeling confident this can be completed
today. Then, however, you need to set up the summaries of the last three
chapters, etc. Once that is complete you are good for the final revamping of
Great Merlyn's Ghost, Volume One. No numbers on the title, boy. - Amorella
0938 hours. No problem, Amorella. No
numbers, not even Roman numerals.
While you are waiting for Zach. You might as
well work on Pouch 21. - Amorella
Supper
time but you had Graeter's black cherry chocolate chip instead. A shelf cloud
moved overhead and lightning with the thunder following. Some rain. This is
after you raked and moved six hundred pounds of soil to where the largest Ash
tree had been. You have another six hundred pounds to move and then probably
another six hundred after that. You have sprayed the English ivy twice so far.
It still looks healthy, so much for chemical concentrations for eradication.
When
you talked to Zach about living cells traveling from Mars to Earth (he has read
and reviewed your first books on Amazon) he said that it is certainly possible
but he suggested you use Tardigrades. We can have a discussion about this early
in book two.
** **
Tardigrades
(commonly known as waterbears or moss piglets) are small,
water-dwelling, segmented micro-animals with eight legs.
Tardigrades are notable for being one of
the most complex of all known polyextremophiles. An extremophile is an organism
that can thrive in a physically or geochemically extreme condition that would
be detrimental to most life on Earth.For example, tardigrades can withstand
temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of
water, pressures about 6 times stronger than pressures found in the deepest
ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than would
kill a person, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water
for more than 10 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less
water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.
Usually, tardigrades are 1 millimetre
(0.039 in) long when they are fully grown. They are short and plump with 4
pairs of legs, each with 4-8 claws also known as "disks." The animals
are prevalent in moss and lichen and, when collected, may be viewed under a
very low-power microscope, making them accessible to the student or amateur
scientist as well as the professional.
Tardigrades
form the phylum Tardigrada, part of the superphylum Ecdysozoa. It is an ancient
group, with fossils dating from 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian period.
The first tardigrades were discovered by Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773.
Since 1778, over 500 tardigrade species have been found.
Hypsibius Dujardni
imaged with a scanning
electron microscope
Physiology
Scientists have reported tardigrades in
hot springs, on top of the Himalayas, under layers of solid ice and in ocean
sediments. Many species can be found in a milder environment like lakes, ponds
and meadows, while others can be found in stone walls and roofs. Tardigrades
are most common in moist environments, but can stay active wherever they can
retain at least some moisture.
Tardigrades are one of the few groups of
species that are capable of reversibly suspending their metabolism and going
into a state of cryptobiosis. Several species regularly survive in a dehydrated
state for nearly ten years. Depending on the environment they may enter this
state via anhydrobiosis, cryobiosis, osmobiosis or anoxybiosis. While in this
state their metabolism lowers to less than 0.01% of normal and their water
content can drop to 1% of normal. Their ability to remain desiccated for such a
long period is largely dependent on the high levels of the non-reducing sugar,
trehalose, which protects their membranes. In this cryptobiotic state the
tardigrade is known as a tun.
Tardigrades are able to survive in
extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. The following are
extremes states tardigrades can survive:
Temperature
– tardigrades can survive being heated for a few minutes to 151 °C
(424 K or 304 F), or being chilled for days at −200 °C
(73 K or -328 F), or some can survive temperatures for a few minutes
at −273 °C (~1 degree above absolute zero /0 Kelvin or -458 F).
Pressure –
they can withstand the extremely low pressure of a vacuum and also very high
pressures, more than 1,200 times atmospheric pressure. Tardigrades can survive
the vacuum of open space and solar radiation combined for at least 10 days.
Some species can also withstand pressure of 6,000 atmospheres, which is nearly
six times the pressure of water in the deepest ocean trench, the Mariana
trench.
Dehydration –
although there is one report of a leg movement in a 120-year-old specimen from
dried moss, this is not generally considered "survival", and the
longest tardigrades have been shown to survive in a dry state is nearly 10
years. When exposed to extremely low temperatures, their body composition goes
from 85% water to only 3%. As water expands upon freezing, dehydration ensures
the tardigrades do not get ripped apart by the freezing ice.
Radiation –
tardigrades can withstand 1,000 times more radiation than other animals, median
lethal doses of 5,000 Gy (of gamma-rays) and 6,200 Gy (of heavy ions) in
hydrated animals (5 to 10 Gy could be fatal to a human). The only explanation
found in earlier experiments for this ability was that their lowered water
state provides fewer reactants for the ionizing radiation. However, subsequent
research found that tardigrades, when hydrated, still remain highly resistant
to shortwave UV radiation in comparison to other animals, and that one factor
for this is their ability to efficiently repair damage to their DNA resulting
from that exposure.
Irradiation of
tardigrade eggs collected directly from a natural substrate (moss) showed a
clear dose-response, with a steep decline in hatchability at doses up to 4 kGy
above which no eggs hatched. The eggs were more tolerant to radiation late in
development. No eggs irradiated at the early developmental stage hatched, and
only one egg at middle stage hatched, while eggs irradiated in the late stage
hatched at a rate indistinguishable from controls.
Environmental toxins
– there is evidence that tardigrades can undergo chemobiosis, a cryptobiotic
response to high levels of environmental toxins. However, as of 2001, these
laboratory results have yet to be verified.
Outer space
– tardigrades are the first known animal to
survive in space. On September 2007, dehydrated tardigrades were taken into low
Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission carrying the BIOPAN astrobiology payload.
For 10 days, groups of tardigrades were exposed to the hard vacuum of outer
space, or vacuum and solar UV radiation. After being rehydrated back on Earth,
over 68% of the subjects protected from high-energy UV radiation revived within
30 minutes following rehydration, but subsequent mortality was high; many of
these produced viable embryos. In contrast, dehydrated samples exposed to the
combined effect of vacuum and full solar UV radiation had significantly reduced
survival, with only three subjects of Milnesium
tardigradum surviving.In May 2011, Italian scientists sent tardigrades into
space along with other extremophiles on STS-134, the final flight of Space Shuttle
Endeavour. Their conclusion was that
microgravity and cosmic radiation "did not significantly affect survival
of tardigrades in flight, confirming that tardigrades represent a useful animal
for space research." In November 2011, they were among the organisms to be
sent by the US-based Planetary Society on the Russian Fobos=Grunt mission's
Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment to Phobos; however, the launch failed.
Evolutionary
relationships and history
A number of morphological and molecular
studies have sought to resolve the relationship of tardigrades to other
lineages of ecdysozoan animals. Two plausible placements have been recovered:
tardigrades most closely related to Arthropoda + Onychophora (a common result
of morphological studies) or tardigrades most closely related to nematodes
(found in some molecular analyses).
The latter hypothesis has been rejected
by recent microRNA and expressed sequence tag analyses. Apparently, the
grouping of tardigrades with nematodes found in a number of molecular studies
is a long branch attraction artifact. Within the arthropod group (called
panarthropoda and comprising onychophora, tardigrades and euarthropoda), three
patterns of relationship are possible: tardigrades sister to onychophora plus
arthropods (the lobopodia hypothesis); onychophora sister to tardigrades plus
arthropods (the tactopoda hypothesis); and onychophora sister to tardigrades.
Recent analyses indicate that the panarthropoda group is monophyletic, and that
tardigrades are a sister group of lobopodia, the lineage consisting of
arthropods and Onychophora. . . .
The minute sizes of tardigrades and their
membranous integuments make their fossilization both difficult to detect and
highly unlikely. The only known fossil specimens comprise some from mid-Cambrian
deposits in Siberia and a few rare specimens from Cretaceous amber.
The Siberian tardigrades differ from
living tardigrades in several ways. They have three pairs of legs rather than
four; they have a simplified head morphology; and they have no posterior head
appendages. But they share their columnar cuticle construction with modern
tardigrades. It is considered that they probably represent a stem group of
living tardigrades.
The rare specimens in Cretaceous amber
comprise Milnesium swolenskyi, from New Jersey, the oldest, whose claws
and mouthparts are indistinguishable from the living M. tartigradum; and
two specimens from western Canada, some 15–20 million years younger than M.
swolenskyi. Of the two latter, one has been given its own genus and family,
Beorn leggi (the genus
named by Cooper after the character Beorn from The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien and the species named after his
student William M. Legg); however, it bears a strong resemblance to many living
specimens in the family Hypsibiidae.
Aysheaia
from the middle Cambrian Burgess shale has been proposed as a sister-taxon to
an arthropod-tardigrade clade.
Tardigrades
have sometimes been linked to the prehistoric oddity Opanbinia as a close living relative.
Selected
and Edited from: Wikipedia - Tardigrades
**
**
1807
hours. I need to clean up the above but I can do this after completed Pouch 21.
Take a break. When you begin go directly to
the Pouch 21 document and we'll clean it up and completed it so it can be
posted tonight. - Amorella
I am not that interested in working on
the last three chapters tonight. I don't care if it is longer than a year. What
is a year anyway when writing a book? Not much.
You
had an early dusk tonight because of the storms. You watched this week's
"Suits" after the CBS News. And tomorrow Mary Lou may come down so
you three can go to a film or so she and Carol will go shopping and out to
lunch. - Amorella
2013 hours. The Wikipedia article is
interesting even if I don't complete understand it in depth. I had fun reading
it carefully. This might only come up in a sentence or two in book two, but it
is worth the conversation because I think, in real life, people from two
different planets would have such a conversation.
That's what makes these books unique, boy.
You play by the natural rules; no deception, just imagination within reason. Let's
get to work on Pouch 21. - Amorella
2039 hours. I have completed the
draft, Diplomatic Pouch 21 in 796 words.
I concur. Add and post. Tomorrow we clean up
these last three chapters and move on to another stage in the book publishing
business. - Amorella
Thank you, Amorella.
***
Diplomatic Pouch 21 ©2013, rho - draft for GMG.Vol.One
It is Thursday, 14 June 2012. This day Blake, Pyl and
Justin leave in an alien Ship for a
flight across the Milky Way Galaxy to ThreePlanets with marsupial humanoids
Friendly, Hartolite and Yermey. They may be away home planet Earth for up to a
year.
Diplomatic
Pouch began in a pressurized 1979 Cessna T210N Turbo Centurion returning from
Detroit to Cleveland. Those on board, pilot Blake Williams, his co-pilot and
sister Pyl and her husband Justin were discussing their recent experience at
the Detroit Auto Show while flying across Lake Erie. That was six very short months
ago.
Presently,
Pyl Williams-Burroughs sits quietly
in the kitchen with a glass of milk and a favorite last Jennifer cookie from
the nearby On the Rise Bakery on Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights. It
is nearly time to leave. Everything has been taken care of down in Cincinnati
and here in Cleveland. Our friends and fellow colleagues believe we have taken
leave for university research jobs with the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil for
the next year. Our houses are rented as of July 1.
I
am ready. I go with my husband and brother so I am not alone. I am quite
compatible with Hartolite and Friendly so I have strong woman companions. I
cannot imagine how this will be. We are studying the language and becoming
saturated with the general culture. We have only to be ourselves and live
honestly, something we three have attempted to do our entire lives. Strangely,
if it were not for what I have witnessed with Ship I don't know if I would have the trust and feel the security
that this can be pulled off and that we will all be the better for it.
Justin
Wayne Burroughs sits on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. The room is dark.
He can see the reflective floor light from under the closed door. I cannot
believe we are doing this. I cannot believe that we will witness the history of
an alien human culture. We do not know everything about ourselves after all
this time and I will see how a culture of three worlds grew from a few tribes
to what it is, essentially a culture twenty thousand years ahead of our own.
Yet, inwardly we are as the same species. This is beyond words.
I
love Pyl with all my heart. I do this with her, my partner for life. Blake is
family. We are family. What adventures will we have? What will we experience? I
cannot wait. Ship is the comfort. To
think flying makes me nervous, but traveling with, I mean, in Ship solidifies
my feelings. He makes me secure. I am so surprised that, even at this hour, I
have no real fears; none that I with those that come from staying on this
planet.
Blake
Williams sits on an old oak chair in his basement workspace thinking how it is
going to be. This will be the most interesting year of my life. I will get to
work with Yermey, one of their greatest minds. I want to know his questions as
well as earlier questions that now have answers. We have common threads. Yermey
speaks of the heartansoulanmind as if it is real. I wonder what are the most
important values the people hold true? How did they learn to live together?
Sometimes I think their species is better than we are; but they have been
around longer, that's all.
I
cannot imagine us being mistreated. Ship
would never allow that. It is easier to trust machinery than it is people.
Maybe that's the reason we love material things so much. Things can be made
stable and secure. We love our machinery large and small. Ship is just an
offshoot. I cannot wait to see what these people have at their disposal on
their own planets. Hell, I am ready to leave this planet for good, with no good-byes
and no regrets. He stands and walks up the stairs without looking back, sees
Pyl and says, "Are you ready?"
Ply stands smiling confidently. "I am."
Blake
shouts up the stairs, "Justin, are you ready to go?"
The
toilet flushed. Justin opened the door and replied, "I'm ready as I'll
ever be."
Blake's
words, "Let's go then," were not a command. Both Pyl and Justin heard
considerate calm in the words, friendly brotherly advice. They followed him out
the back door. The three looked up to a surprise, a set of aluminum steps
dropped down and they climbed up one by one. The steps lifted up automatically.
The door was sealed shut, Ship said, "Time for a nightcap."
Friendly,
Hartolite and Yermey entered the room and Friendly, with a wonderfully veracious
smile said, "Welcome aboard."
796 words
***
