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How Grown-Ups Deal With 'Microaggressions'

Whenever I first heard the word "microaggression," sometime in the last five years, I'm sure I was unaware how big "micro" could get. The accusation of a microaggression was about to become a pervasive feature of the Internet, and particularly social media. An offense most of us didn't even know existed, suddenly we were all afraid of being accused of.

We used to call this "rudeness," "slights" or "ignorant remarks." Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)

Western society, they argue, has shifted from an honor culture -- in which slights are taken very seriously, and avenged by the one slighted -- to a dignity culture, in which personal revenge is discouraged, and justice is outsourced to third parties, primarily the law. The law being a cumbersome beast, people in dignity cultures are encouraged to ignore slights, or negotiate them privately by talking with the offender, rather than seeking some more punitive sanction.

Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights. This sounds a lot like honor culture, doesn't it? Yes, with two important differences. The first is that while victimhood is shameful in an honor culture -- and indeed, the purpose of taking vengeance is frequently to avoid this shame -- victim status is actively sought in the new culture, because victimhood is a prerequisite for getting redress. The second is that victim culture encourages people to seek help from third parties, either authorities or the public, rather than seeking satisfaction themselves. (...)

I'm using microaggressions broadly here: to define the small slights by which any majority group subtly establishes its difference from its minority members. That means that I am including groups that may not come to mind for victim status, like conservatives in very liberal institutions. And no doubt many of my readers are preparing to deliver a note or a comment saying I shouldn't dare to compare historically marginalized groups with politically powerful ones. (...)

A while back, when I wrote about shamestorming, I ended up in a Twitter discussion with a guy who chided me for letting my privilege blind me to the ways that minorities (specifically women in tech, and more broadly on the Internet), experience microaggressions. You know how that conversation ended? When I pointed out that he had just committed a classic microagression: mansplaining to me something that I had actually experienced, and he had not. As soon as I did, he apologized, though that hadn't really been my intent. My intent was to point out that microaggressions are often unintentional (this guy clearly considered himself a feminist ally).

But I inadvertently demonstrated an even greater difficulty: Complaints about microaggressions can be used to stop complaints about microaggressions. There is no logical resting place for these disputes; it's microaggressions all the way down. And in the process, they make impossible demands on members of the ever-shrinking majority: to know everything about every possible victim group, to never inadvertently appropriate any part of any culture in ways a member doesn't like, or misunderstand something, or make an innocent remark that reads very differently to someone with a different experience. Which will, of course, only hasten the scramble for members of the majority to gain themselves some sort of victim status that can protect them from sanction.

by Megan McArdle, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Graham Barclay

There Is No Theory of Everything

I want to talk here about an undergraduate teacher of mine about whom many stories were told, but who is not so widely known. His name was Frank Cioffi (1928-2012), an Italian-American from a peasant family who spent his early years close to Washington Square. His mother died giving birth to him, and his distraught father died when Frank was an infant. He was then brought up by his grandparents, who spoke in a Neapolitan dialect. He dropped out of high school, spent time with the United States Army in Japan and then in France trying to identify dug-up corpses of American soldiers for the war grave commission. In 1950, he somehow managed to get into Ruskin College, Oxford, on the G.I. Bill, where he began to study philosophy and discovered the work of Wittgenstein, whose later thinking was just then beginning to circulate. After teaching in Singapore and Kent, he became the founding professor of the philosophy department at the University of Essex in the early 1970s. I encountered him there in 1982. It was memorable.

Frank (which is how he was always referred to) has recently become the subject of an interesting book by David Ellis, “Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt Sleeves.” It gives a very good sense of what it felt like to be in a room with Frank. Truth to tell, Ellis’s title is deceptive, as I never recall Frank in shirtsleeves. He wore a sweater, usually inside out. He never had laces in the work boots he always wore, and strangest of all, because of an acute sensitivity to fabrics, he wore pajamas underneath his clothes at all times. The word “disheveled” doesn’t begin to describe the visual effect that Frank had on the senses. He was a physically large, strong-looking man, about 6-foot-4. The pajamas were clearly visible at the edges of his sweater, his fly was often undone (some years later, his only word of teaching advice to me was “always check your fly”) and he sometimes seemed to hold his pants up with a piece of string. In his pockets would be scraps of paper with typewritten quotations from favorite writers like George Eliot, Tolstoy or Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whom he revered. (...)

Despite the astonishing breadth of his interests, Frank’s core obsession in teaching turned on the relation between science and the humanities. More particularly, his concern was with the relation between the causal explanations offered by science and the kinds of humanistic description we find, say, in the novels of Dickens or Dostoevsky, or in the sociological writings of Erving Goffman and David Riesman. His quest was to try and clarify the occasions when a scientific explanation was appropriate and when it was not, and we need instead a humanistic remark. His conviction was that our confusions about science and the humanities had wide-ranging and malign societal consequences.

Let me give an example. Imagine that you are depressed, because of the death of a loved one, heartbreak or just too much hard and seemingly pointless work. You go to see a doctor. After trying to explain what ails you, with the doctor fidgeting and looking at his watch, he exclaims: “Ah, I see the problem. Take this blue pill and you will be cured.” However efficacious the blue pill might be, in this instance the doctor’s causal diagnosis is the wrong one. What is required is for you to be able to talk, to feel that someone understands your problems and perhaps can offer some insight or even suggestions on how you might move forward in your life. This, one imagines, is why people go into therapy.

But let’s flip it around. Let’s imagine that you are on a ferry crossing the English Channel during a terrible winter storm. Your nausea is uncontrollable and you run out onto the deck to vomit the contents of your lunch, breakfast and the remains of the previous evening’s dinner. You feel so wretched that you no longer fear death — you wish you were dead. Suddenly, on the storm-tossed deck, appears R.D. Laing, the most skilled, charismatic and rhetorically gifted existential psychiatrist of his generation, in a blue velvet suit. He proceeds to give you an intense phenomenological description of how your guts feel, the sense of disorientation, the corpselike coldness of your flesh, the sudden loss of the will to live. This is also an error. On a ferry you want a blue pill that is going to alleviate the symptoms of seasickness and make you feel better.

Frank’s point is that our society is deeply confused by the occasions when a blue pill is required and not required, or when we need a causal explanation and when we need a further description, clarification or elucidation. We tend to get muddled and imagine that one kind of explanation (usually the causal one) is appropriate in all occasions when it is not. (...)

This is the risk of what some call “scientism” — the belief that natural science can explain everything, right down to the detail of our subjective and social lives. All we need is a better form of science, a more complete theory, a theory of everything. Lord knows, there are even Oscar-winning Hollywood movies made about this topic. Frank’s point, which is still hugely important, is that there is no theory of everything, nor should there be. There is a gap between nature and society. The mistake, for which scientism is the name, is the belief that this gap can or should be filled.

by Simon Critchley, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tucker Nichols

How the NFL is Reshaping Surveillance Society

As guards were going so far as to check inside NFL fans' wallets as part of routine security measures before a recent preseason game at Levi's Stadium, a different form of surveillance was taking place on the inside of the San Francisco 49ers' 1-year-old, $1.3 billion home here in Silicon Valley.

We're not talking about facial recognition devices, police body cams, or other security measures likely zeroing in on fans. Instead, employees from San Jose-based Zebra Technologies had recently finished scanning the NFL uniforms of the 49ers and of their opponents—the Dallas Cowboys. All of a sudden, an on-the-field de facto surveillance society was instantly created when Zebra techies activated nickel-sized Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) chips that were fastened inside players' shoulder pads. Every movement of every player now could be monitored within an accuracy level of all but a few inches.

On its surface, this seems pretty innocuous. Cameras already track things like total player movement in sports, allowing teams to better recognize tendencies or gauge the physical toll on players. RFID chips, however, can provide more accurate, more granular information along these lines. The NFL's new real-time player tracking data—including things such as player speed and team formations—undoubtedly promises to reformat the game in terms of fan participation, team practicing methods, and potentially game-time strategy.

There's a larger story playing itself out as well. The league's RFID initiative may push far beyond the gridiron.

That's because this so-called geo-fencing technology has a geekier side, and it will likely recast things like fantasy football, the Microsoft's Xbox One experience, and perhaps even the Madden NFL video game produced by Electronic Arts. What's more, the technology potentially opens up new proposition gambling bets in Las Vegas sports books or other gambling venues. But its most unexpected impact will have nothing to do with sports at all. Fortune 500 companies are watching the NFL closely, examining how they might incorporate the RFID chip to monitor every move of their onsite employees from the construction site, the office, and beyond.

by David Kravets, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image:Christopher Schodt

Newly Risen From the Yeast: THC
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Image: Oliver Kayser

One Symptom in New Medical Codes: Doctor Anxiety

[ed. How about patient anxiety? If there's an upside for anyone here other than insurance companies (who would deny your claim), I'm not seeing it.]

The nation’s health care providers are under orders to start using a new system of medical codes to describe illnesses and injuries in more detail than ever before. The codes will cover common ailments: Did a diabetic also have kidney disease? But also included are some that are far less common: whether the patient was crushed by a crocodile or sucked into a jet engine.

The more than 100,000 new codes, which will take effect on Oct. 1, have potential benefits, as they will require doctors to make a deeper assessment of many patients.

But the change is causing waves of anxiety among health care providers, who fear that claims will be denied and payments delayed if they do not use the new codes, or do not use them properly. Some doctors and hospitals are already obtaining lines of credit because they fear that the transition to the new system will cause cash-flow problems.

“It’s a sea change for physicians,” said Dr. Pardeep Kumar, a 46-year-old internist here who is counting down to Oct. 1. “We will have to be very much more specific.” (...)

The codes, from the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD-10, have significant implications for patients. For example, Dr. Kumar said, doctors may need to perform additional tests to help determine if a patient with high blood pressure has heart failure.

ICD-10 includes 68,000 diagnostic codes, compared with 14,000 in the current compendium. The number of codes for inpatient hospital procedures will expand to 87,000, from 4,000.

Consumers often need prior approval from insurers for expensive tests and medical procedures. To get approval, they need a valid diagnostic code.

Dr. Michael R. Marks, an orthopedic surgeon and coding expert in Connecticut, said that if doctors did not use the proper codes, insurers could delay approval. “The patient,” he said, “will get frustrated and ask: ‘Why has my M.R.I. not been authorized yet? Why has my surgery not been scheduled?’ ” (...)

As people make the change, doctors and hospital executives say, it is inevitable that some claims will be denied for services that were provided but not properly coded. Patients may see the denials in statements they receive from insurers.

Many doctors and hospitals say they will step up efforts to collect the patient’s share of the bill, including deductibles and co-payments, at the time of service.

by Robert Pear, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: James Brosher

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roll of materials edo period
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Calvin and Hobbes
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Hipster Barbie Is So Much Better at Instagram Than You

Coffee & Kinfolk. Cuz my lyfe is beautiful.

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[ed. See also: Socality Barbie Hits Uncomfortably Close to Home]

The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails

By any measure, young city dwellers are less and less likely to own a car. And New York City officials have spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours ensuring that trend works for the recent grads and young professionals that flock to it constantly. NYC bus, rail, and ferry systems are keeping up with a growing population; the roads, well, that’s a different story altogether.

Transportation engineer Samuel Schwartz — better known as “Gridlock Sam” to his readers in the Daily News — has studied transportation in New York City for almost all his life, beginning as a taxi driver in the 1960s, and eventually serving as the Department of Transportation’s Chief Engineer. Today, his eponymous consulting firm helps the city consider what efficiency could look like and his new book, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars, is on the display rack. The semi-autobiographical book follows New York City’s evolution into a public transit powerhouse and kicks dirt onto the grave of urban drivers.

In the book, Schwartz makes an excellent case for why the future of most big metropolitan areas is in optimized public transit systems. He gave Inverse a preview of what’s coming down the tracks for New Yorkers.

What is the current status of transportation infrastructure in New York City?

It’s a mixed bag. The good news is that loads of people are using our ubiquitous subway systems. We have such an extensive network, but it’s a network that’s being stressed with some more frequent delays and breakdowns in the systems. I doubt if anybody would rate it an “A,” but one treasure is that it’s attracted 100 million more visitors in just one year. We’re beginning to see traffic volumes of people we haven’t seen on our subways since the late 1940s. That’s before the big surge in car traffic.

I saw that they were ranked fourth-worst in terms of car congestion, and that’s not a surprise to me, but then again all the cities that made the hit list — San Francisco and Washington D.C., Los Angeles — have also been doing very well as of late, so it’s not such a bad list to be on. And, as I pointed out in my book, congestion isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, at times it makes sense to introduce some congestion measures to slow the traffic down; it actually helps business.

What are the changing conditions that will affect New York City transportation in the next 25 to 50 years?

We’re already seeing more rapid changes than we’ve seen in a very, very long time. One is just land issues — the amount of development within three miles of the central business district. Within the central business district itself, growth has been extraordinary. It’s largely been driven by millennials, who are living in all the communities that have covered the East River — from Williamsburg, to Red Hook, to Long Island City, to Hunters Point, to Astoria. That’s created a whole change in demand. These are people that are looking for active transportation.

Bike and pedestrian paths will reach their limits. Before the East River bridges opened the only way that you could get directly from Queens or Brooklyn into Manhattan were bike or pedestrian paths. Even more rapidly changing have been transportation network companies, like Uber, Lyft, Via, and about 30 others that are all going around the United States and the world, and are looking to get into the New York market. So we’re seeing many many more vehicles on city streets, a lot of people that just use Uber, driving part-time, and that’s adding to congestion. Travel speeds have been going down.

The third big factor is that autonomous vehicles are coming. We probably will have them by 2030; they’ll be fairly common. Before 2030, I believe there will be lanes on highways that will be autonomous vehicle lanes where you take your hand off the steering wheel. You already have devices in cars that can allow you to accelerate and decelerate and cruise in lanes, so we’re not that many years away. Maybe in 2020 or so we might start seeing the first of those lanes!

But what autonomous vehicles will do is both good and bad. For those people who are going to be driving anyhow, it does make it safer. But it also will only contribute to a lifestyle that’s more sedentary and ever-increasing, which I discuss in my book parallels the growth of obesity and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, stroke and others problems. I worry about a future in which people don’t walk. Their Uber car takes them right to the portal of wherever they’re going, and their office chair comes right out and greets them. Or it’s their home and their recliner comes and greets them. We won’t need legs anymore, like in Wall-E.

Your new book discusses how cars are falling out of favor in cities all around the U.S., including NYC. When did you first start noticing that cars in urban communities were on the decline? Was this all of a sudden, or gradual? (...)

What we thought was lousy transportation in the 1950s is no longer seen that way. The younger people want to be able to get places. It’s not about the status symbol of your big car with the huge rims, which was my generation. I had a big Chevy Impala with huge rims on it and I loved that car and that was a sign of freedom for me. Now a sign of freedom is having a smart phone and having the apps or Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, or Via. Suddenly you’re more free. You don’t have to lug around several thousand pounds of steel and figure out a place to park it and worry if you’re going to have a couple drinks and fight the traffic on the way home.

by Neel V. Patel, Inverse |  Read more:

Image: Jon Harald Søby

F*ck Your Feelings

Put down the talking stick. Stop fruitlessly seeking "closure" with your peevish co-worker. And please, don't bother telling your spouse how annoying you find their tongue-clicking habit—sometimes honesty is less like a breath of fresh air and more like a fart. That’s the argument of Michael Bennett and Sarah Bennett, the father-daughter duo behind the new self-help book F*ck Feelings.

The elder Bennett is a psychiatrist and American Psychiatric Association distinguished fellow. His daughter is a comedy writer. Together, they provide a tough-love, irreverent take on “life's impossible problems.” The crux of their approach is that life is hard and negative emotions are part of it. The key is to see your “bullshit wishes” for just what they are (bullshit), and instead to pursue real, achievable goals.

Stop trying to forgive your bad parents, they advise. Jerks are capable of having as many kids as anyone else—at least until men’s rights conventions come equipped with free vasectomy booths. If you happen to be the child of a jerk, that's just another obstacle to overcome.

In fact, stop trying to free yourself of all anger and hate. In all likelihood you're doing a really awesome job, the Bennetts argue, despite all the shitty things that happen to you.

Oh, and a word on shit: “Profanity is a source of comfort, clarity, and strength,” they write. “It helps to express anger without blame, to be tough in the face of pain.”

I recently spoke with the Bennetts by phone about what the f*cking deal is with their book. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. (...)

Khazan: How would you sum up your approach to life’s problems, whether it’s love or childhood issues, or work?

Sarah Bennett: The first step is accepting what you can't control. So many people who come to my father—they want something they can't have. They want a happy relationship that’s never going to be happy, or they want opportunities that are not easy to come by.

So it's going into accepting what you can't control, the factors that are out of your hands, and seeing what you can do with what you can control. And learning to be proud of yourself not just for accomplishing what you can, and not beating yourself up for what you can't. Not seeing yourself as a failure, when you haven’t really failed because it’s not something that you could have controlled in the first place. And admiring your ability to withstand a feeling of rejection, and the frustration and the pain, and keep going on towards a more reasonable goal while being a good person. That’s also what’s emphasized so heavily. Figuring out your own values and sticking to them.

Michael: A big part of this—and it’s so hard to capture—is being able to laugh at how much life sucks. If you can laugh at it, you don’t take it as personally. That moment when you can laugh at how much life sucks and open your mind to the idea that, there you are. What are you gonna do?

Khazan: How would you say that this differs from other advice that you see out there? What’s the main difference between you and a lot of the other “how to be more content” books?

Sarah: Well, from what we know—and we are two people that have never read a self-help book—they seem to put the onus for happiness on the reader. I've had too many friends who made Secret collages. And that makes it seem like, if you made your collage as prescribed by [the pseudoscientific self-help book] The Secret, and you’re not happy, you screwed up. When that’s not really fair to you. You could wake up that morning determined to be happy, and the first step you take out of your building is into dog shit, and now you’re unhappy, but you didn’t put the dog shit there. It's not your fault. You really can't control your happiness, no matter what a book says.

Michael: I think there ought to be a law that you spend a certain amount of time right up front looking for the limit and preparing yourself for it. ... You go in the hospital and right away you start to think about what the limits are—what does it mean if things don't go right? Where is the point where you’ve had enough? People are ready to think like that, and they’re starting to think like that about medical problems. We should think like that about psychiatric problems. (...)

Khazan: I know that the title is a little bit glib, but do you think there’s any downside in walling off your emotions or not necessarily exploring the roots of your emotions too deeply?

Sarah: We always try and make sure that people know that we don’t hate feelings in general. That we aren’t total Vulcans. But this is more of a book about solving problems. It’s to not make feelings the most important factor in how you would approach a problem. In terms of getting to the source of problems, the issue with that is a lot of people think about it like, “If I can remember where I last saw my keys, then I can get them and everything will be okay.” If you can get to where you last or where you first saw this issue, that doesn’t make the issue go away.

Sometimes the search for the source of a problem can be a distraction, and it can also be a disappointment. A lot of the time, knowing why, for example, you pathologically cheat on partners, and you can say, “Aha, it’s because my dad was a jerk and he cheated on my mom.” That isn’t immediately going to flip a switch in your brain and make you monogamous.

What’s the real result? Will it just be rumination on all these bad things that have happened to me? Or, what is a more active action I can pursue that can have a more possible positive and constructive outcome?

by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: YulyYulia

You Aren't Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football

Every first-time player of daily fantasy football begins the new season undefeated, just like even the most hopeless NFL teams. But after 16 weeks of real football, most rookie fantasy players will have been separated from their money, just as certainly as the Cleveland Browns will be disabused of their playoff ambitions.

Daily fantasy is getting ready to generate more losers in 2015 than ever before. Each year in the history of daily fantasy sports has been bigger than the last, and September has become the biggest month for new fans trying the game, which combines the stats-jockeying of traditional fantasy contests with the thrills of old-fashioned sports betting. (Fantasy sports are exempted from the federal ban on sports gambling.) FanDuel and DraftKings, the two main services, will bring in a combined $60 million in entry fees in the first week of the NFL season, according to Adam Krejcik, a partner at Eilers Research. Sports books in Las Vegas, by contrast, are expected to handle about $30 million.

The rival startups prospered in football's offseason. Both companies raised huge new rounds of investment, bringing DraftKings’s total haul to $426 million and FanDuel’s to $363 million, and both are now valued at more than $1 billion. To get to the size their investors are expecting requires a continuous stream of new players lured by ever-increasing prize pools with the help of muscular advertising campaigns. These ads never spell out a simple truth about daily fantasy competitions: While any player might get lucky on the back of a handful of entries, over time nearly all of the prize money flows to a tiny elite equipped with elaborate statistical modeling and automated tools that can manage hundreds of entries at once and identify the weakest opponents.

As in poker, the top fantasy players who make off with most of the prize money are known as "sharks," and they've become embodiments of the riches on offer as well as threats to conitnued growth. “We don’t make any apologies that it’s a game of skill, and you might go up against the best in the industry,” says Nigel Eccles, the chief executive of FanDuel. “Some of the people are really good.” But new players won't stick around to keep paying entry fees unless there's at least a sense that victory is possible. Nobody wants to be a fantasy football fish.

Saahil Sud is a fake-sports apex predator. He enters hundreds of daily contents each day in baseball and football under the name "maxdalury," and he almost always trounces the field. He claims to risk an average of $140,000 per day with a return of about 8 percent. Sud studied math and economics at Amherst College and took a job in data science at a digital marketing firm before shifting to full-time fantasy. He's now the top-ranked daily fantasy sports player, according to Rotogrinders, a stats site for daily fantasy players. He says he's made more than $2 million so far this year. (...)

What Sud does each day doesn’t seem much like sports fandom—or even like much fun. He spends between eight and 15 hours working from his two-bedroom apartment in downtown Boston; the range reflects his uncertainly over whether to count the time watching games as work. During baseball season he puts about 200 entries into tournaments each night, and he can play more than 1,000 times in the weekly contests during NFL season.

by Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: 731; Photos: Alamy (1), Getty Images (1)

Bud Powell

[ed. Reminiscent of my childhood growing up in the canefields of Hawaii, sugar mill and all. So much fun.]
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Goodbye, Privacy: ‘Selfie-drones’ Will Hover Over Vacationers

Think remote-controlled drones and selfie-sticks are intrusive? Prepare for the selfie-drone.

This next generation of drones, which are just beginning to roll out, doesn’t require users to hold remote controllers: They are hands-free. Simply toss them in the air, and they will follow you like Tinker Bell. With names such as Lily (around $700 on pre-order) and Nixie (not yet available for pre-order), they are capable of recording breathtaking video footage and trailing adventure travelers across bridges and streams, down ski slopes and into secluded gardens.

Nixie, which you can wear on your wrist until you want to fling it off for a photo or video, has a “boomerang mode” that allows it to fly back to you as if it were a trained raptor. A promotional video for Lily shows a man with a backpack lobbing the drone like a stone over a bridge and casually walking away, only to have the thing float up and follow him. Think you can outmaneuver the contraption in white-water rapids? Lily is waterproof. I watched with awe a video of Lily being dumped into a river beside a woman in a kayak (where one assumes Lily will perish), yet within seconds emerging and rising, like Glenn Close from the bathtub in “Fatal Attraction.”

There is no denying that the latest drone technology is impressive. And the footage is striking. Adventure travelers who wish to watch themselves scale Kilimanjaro or surf in Hawaii along the North Shore of Oahu will no doubt want one. But if selfie-drones become staples of every traveler who can afford them, we stand to lose more than we stand to gain when it comes to privacy, safety and quality-of-life factors like peace and beauty.

by Stephanie Rosenbloom NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Wesley Bedrosian/The New York Times

Water Bears

When scientists at the American Museum of Natural History mounted an exhibit about creatures that survive under conditions few others can tolerate, they did not have to go far to find the show’s mascot.

“We just got them from Central Park,” said Mark Siddall, a curator of the show, Life at the Limits. “Scoop up some moss, and you’ll find them.”

He was talking about tardigrades, tiny creatures that live just about everywhere: in moss and lichens, but also in bubbling hot springs, Antarctic ice, deep-sea trenches and Himalayan mountaintops. They have even survived the extreme cold and radiation of outer space.

Typically taupe-ish and somewhat translucent, and a sixteenth of an inch or so long, they are variously described as resembling minuscule hippopotamuses (if hippos had giant snouts and eight legs, each with several claws), mites or, most commonly, bears. Many people call them “water bears” or “bears of the moss.” (The word “tardigrade” is from the Latin for “slow walker” and pronounced TAR-dee-grade.)

Once an object of interest only among zoological specialists, tardigrades now are generating widespread enthusiasm. Admirers have produced artwork and children’s books about them, and have even organized the International Society of Tardigrade Hunters “to advance the study of tardigrade (water bear) biology while engaging and collaborating with the public.”

According to the society, formed this year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, people can find tardigrades if they gather some lichen or moss, especially on a damp day, put it in a shallow dish of water, and “agitate” it a bit. Debris will settle to the bottom of the dish, and tardigrades will probably be prowling in it.

The museum exhibit, which runs until January, also includes beetles, flowers, corals and other animals with unusual ways of coping with hostile environments. But its entrance is guarded by a 10-foot replica of a tardigrade, seemingly floating overhead. That’s fitting, because the tardigrade, which has a natural life span of about a year, is particularly impressive among the exhibit’s “extremeophiles.”

Confronted with drying, rapid temperature changes, changes in water salinity or other problems, tardigrades can curtail their metabolism to 0.01 percent of normal, entering a kind of suspended animation in which they lose “the vast, vast, vast majority of their body water,” Dr. Siddall said. They curl up into something called a “tun.”

Tuns can be subjected to atmospheric pressure 600 times that of the surface of Earth, and they will bounce right back. They can be chilled to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero for more than a year, no problem. The European Space Agency once sent tuns into space: Two-thirds survived simultaneous exposure to solar radiation and the vacuum of space.

Without water, “the damaging effects of freezing cannot happen,” Dr. Siddall explained. “It protects against heat because the water inside cannot turn into a gas that expands.” Even radiation needs water to do damage, he said. When cosmic radiation hits water in a cell, it produces a highly reactive form of oxygen that damages cell DNA. The tun doesn’t have this problem.

Tuns have been reconstituted after more than a century and brought back to life as tardigrades, looking not a day older.

by Cornelia Dean, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eye of Science/Science Source

How are Banksy's New York works holding up? (ed. not well)

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