Who’s in the mood for some good news?
Yeah, when we talk about all the changes taking place on Earth, we usually wind up talking
about living things that are endangered, threatened, or even extinct.
But science is always giving us lots of discoveries of new kinds of life as well.
To remind us that we’re still finding new organisms all over the planet, even as others
are disappearing, every year the International Institute for Species Exploration issues its
Top 10 New Species list.
On Thursday it released its roster of the most interesting species discovered in 2014,
and they range from the pesky to the huge to the adorable.
I’m assuming you want to see the adorable, so let’s start there.
Well, we’ve told you before about the olinguito -- it looks like a cross between a raccoon
and a teddy bear -- and it’s the first mammal to be discovered in the Americas in 35 years.
It was only confirmed in the wild last summer, found in the cloud forests of Ecuador and
Colombia.
But it turns out that, for the past century or so, some olinguitos had been mistakenly
displayed in museums, and even zoos, as their larger relatives, olingos.
It was only after a DNA comparison, and many reports of strange, little olingos acting
weird in zoos, that biologists confirmed it was a whole different animal.
Plants, too, made this year’s list, but none can rival the size -- or the awesome
name -- of the Kaweesak’s Dragon Tree.
Hard to imagine it’s gone overlooked for so long, since the dragon tree grows up to
12 meters tall and sports a crown 12 meters wide, with leaves shaped like sword blades.
But it grows only on limestone hills in parts of Burma and Thailand, and there are only
about 2,500 of them known to exist.
What’s more, biologists say the dragon tree is endangered because the limestone it grows
on is rapidly being extracted to be used for concrete.
And one surprise on the list is an organism that was found growing in probably one of
the only place on Earth where we absolutely do not want anything but us to live.
The new bacterium known as Tersicoccus phoenicis was found growing in two different clean rooms
where NASA’s Phoenix Lander is being assembled -- one in Florida and the other in French
Guiana.
Yes, it was named after a Mars lander.
We make spacecraft in these hyper-sanitized clean rooms because we don’t want to contaminate
the other worlds we send them to -- in this case, the Phoenix will be going to Mars -- and
we don’t wanna muck up the experiments that we conduct to test for alien life.
But sure enough, these germs survived multiple rounds of chemical cleansers and UV sterilization,
giving us new insights into the extreme environments that life can survive in.
You can check out the rest of the IISE’s Top 10 List in the links below.
But now let’s get ready to talk about something really huge: last week, work finally began
on key components of the world’s first experimental fusion reactor.
It’s called ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and it will weigh 23
thousand tons, and take up about 60 soccer fields worth of space in southern France.
By the time it’s ready to go online in 2025, it’ll have more than ten million parts...including
80,000 kilometers of superconducting filaments, to power its immense magnets.
This thing is going to rival one of my favorite pieces of hardware -- the Large Hadron Collider
-- for the title of ‘most complicated machine ever built.’
ITER’s ultimate aim is to generate energy the same way the Sun does: by fusing hydrogen
atoms to make helium.
It’s going to try to do it by using a magnetic field to contain superheated plasma in a doughnut-shaped
reactor called a tokamak.
So sounds simple enough…why does it need to weigh as much as three Eiffel Towers?
Well, the Sun has a lot going for it, other than super-high temperatures, when it comes
to causing fusion.
It’s got all that gravity.
But we cannot replicate that gravity on Earth, so our plasma needs to be that much hotter
in order to compensate.
The core of the Sun is about fifteen million degrees Celsius.
The ITER tokamak is going to be ten times hotter.
TEN TIMES HOTTER THAN THE CORE OF THE SUN!
And right now, in the French Riviera, the magnets that are going to power this thing
are being manufactured.
They’re made of massive loops of high-grade stainless steel.
Seven of these things stacked on top of each other will make one magnetic coil, and will
weigh about as much as a 747.
Many believe that fusion power is the world’s best hope for clean and plentiful energy;
but others say that ITER will just end up costing 20 billion dollars and being a neato
science experiment but not actually helping with the energy crisis…
Remind me to follow up with you about this in 11 years or so.
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