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CAIRO – The Islamic State group on
Wednesday claimed to be holding a Norwegian man and a Chinese consultant
hostage and demanded ransom for their release.
The extremist group posted pictures of the two men wearing yellow
prison outfits in the latest issue of its online magazine Dabiq. It
identifies the Norwegian man as Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad, 48, from
Oslo, and the Chinese man as Fan Jinghui, 50, a freelance consultant
from Beijing.
The magazine lists a telegram number for "whoever would like to pay the ransom for his release and transfer."
It does not say when or where the two were captured. The IS group
controls large parts of Iraq and Syria, and has killed several captives
in gruesome videos released online.
Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, at a news conference in Oslo
on Wednesday, confirmed that one of the hostages was a Norwegian man in
his 40s being held in Syria and "everything indicates that (the Islamic
State group) is behind it."
Solberg said the man was captured at the end of January.
"The kidnappers have presented a series of demands and significant
amounts of ransom money," she said. "We cannot give in and won't give in
to pressure from terrorists and criminals. Norway does not pay ransom."
Despite the country's unwillingness to pay ransom, Solberg said
Norwegian authorities are working with various parties in several
countries to free the hostage.
"Our goal is to get our citizen home," she said. "But let me be very clear, this is a very demanding case."
Chinese officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
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.
A color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of a tardigrade found in moss samples from Croatia in its active state.Credit
Eye of Science/Science Source
“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.)
A close-up micrograph of a tardigrade egg.Credit
Eye of Science/Science Source
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.
Little
is known about their evolution, which is too bad because biologists
think it must have been interesting. But tardigrade fossils are hard to
spot.
For
a long time, biologists grouped them with arthropods, other creatures,
mostly small, with eight legs. Only recently have tardigrades been given
their own phylum, a major taxonomic category.
People who have become transfixed by tardigrades often say they came across a photo or article by chance.
“I just stumbled across it,” said Thomas Gieseke, an artist and illustrator in Merriam, Kan., who created “The Tardigrade Queen,”
an acrylic-on-canvas work depicting a tardigrade on a throne, complete
with tiara and royal crest, which was shown at the Todd Weiner Gallery
in Kansas City, Mo.
“I
stumbled on a photograph of one,” he said in a telephone interview. “I
was just fascinated.” Though he has never seen a tardigrade in the wild,
he said, “it’s just the most resilient creature on the face of the
planet.”
“I like their little claws. They look like hands,” he added. “I thought, ‘This thing warrants royalty status.’ ”
Another tardigrade enthusiast, Michael W. Shaw of Richmond, Va., got interested in them
more than a decade ago when he was helping his two daughters with
school science projects. Though he knew nothing about tardigrades — his
degree was in fine arts — he ended up taking microscopes into his
daughters’ classes to spread the word about the fascinating creatures.
Later,
he made his own contribution to the scientific literature. “I read a
paper about tardigrades showing where they were in the U.S., and New
Jersey, where we were living at the time, had a zero,” he said.
Mr.
Shaw, who was living then in Somerset, decided to visit every one of
the 21 counties in New Jersey and sample lichen and tree bark, two
microenvironments hospitable to tardigrades. Between 2001 and 2009, he
said, “I went to rural and urban sites, parking lots, nature preserves,
anywhere. I found them in every county.”
Then Vice did a video
about Mr. Shaw. Soon new fans were arguing online about whether
tardigrades came from outer space (an idea Mr. Shaw does not rule out)
and how — or even if — they evolved.
Eventually,
the work turned into two books Mr. Shaw has self-published —
“Tardigrade Quiz and Fact Book” (Fresh Squeezed Publishing, 2014) and
“Tardigrade Science Project Book” (Fresh Squeezed Publishing, 2011).
Both discuss tardigrades and explain how young naturalists can gather
specimens, make slides and otherwise dive into their snouty,
eight-legged world.
Today
Mr. Shaw’s tardigrade guides are selling slowly but steadily (typical
reader comment: “Love those tardigrades!”), and he has done another
guide for microscope hobbyists.
“The
good news is you can find them almost anywhere,” according to the
Tardigrade Hunters website. The group invites tardigrade hunters to
submit their “prized specimens” for examination under the university’s
high-powered microscopes.
The
samples will not be returned, the society notes, but photographs of
particularly interesting specimens may be posted online as the Tardigrade of the Week.
In
ordinary life, tardigrades don’t get up to much. Dr. Siddall said that
like most animals, they spend their time “hanging out and eating” plants
and animals smaller than themselves, and possibly even indulging in
cannibalism.
“People
often say, ‘What’s their purpose? What’s their role in the universe?’ ”
Dr. Siddall said. He has no ready answer. They might be useful for the
study of suspended animation. But, he added, “are we going to find a way
to put humans into suspended animation? I doubt it.”
Anyway,
he said, attributing some kind of larger purpose to the tardigrade is
not something a biologist would want to do. Creatures don’t have to have
a purpose. “They merely are.”
Hardik Patel Create Nav Nirman Sena (organization formed to execute the movement).
Date:
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હાર્દિક પટેલે કરી પટેલ નવનિર્માણ સેનાની રચના (આંદોલન ચલાવવા સંગઠનની રચના કરી).
હાર્દિક પટેલ તેના રાષ્ટ્રીય અધ્યક્ષ બન્યા.
કોઈપણ ભોગે પટેલો માટે હક્ક અપાવવાનું એલાન.
૧૨ મહિનામાં ૧૬ રાજયોમાં પટેલ અનામત રેલી .
અંતિમ મહારેલી દિલ્હીમાં .
પટેલ નવનિર્માણ સેના (પીએનએસ) નું નિર્માણ .
હાર્દિક પટેલ રાષ્ટ્રીય અધ્યક્ષ આંદોલન સમિતિ (આંદોલન સમાપ્ત થયા પછી સમિતિનું વિસ્તરણ કરશે).
હાર્દિક પટેલે કહ્યું કે કોઈપણ સંજોગોમાં ગુજરાતના પટેલ પરિવારોને અનામતનો હક્ક અપાવીશ અને ભારતના પટેલોને એકજૂટ કરીશ .
બહુ જલ્દી અમોને અમારો હક્ક મળી જશે . સમાજના નામ ઉપર અંગે રાજનીતિ કયારેય નહિં કરીએ .
હાર્દિકે કહ્યું કે ૭.૮૫ લાખ કુર્મી પટેલો અમારા સંગઠનમાં જોડાયા છે
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