First clown in space hosts show to save Earth's water

Wearing a red clown nose, the Canadian founder of Cirque du Soleil hosted an out-of-this-world performance event on Friday, saying he wanted to use his trip as a space tourist to highlight the scarcity of water on Earth.Guy Laliberte's two-hour performance event called "Moving Stars and Earth for Water" linked the International Space Station with singers, dancers and celebrity campaigners in 14 world cities in what organisers called the first event of its kind to be hosted from space."I see stars, I see darkness and emptiness. But planet Earth looks so great, and also so fragile," Laliberte said from the International Space Station, where he has spent the past week after paying $35 million to fly on a Russian spacecraft and become the world's seventh space tourist."I decided to use this privilege to raise awareness of water issues," he said. "I believe that with true art and emotion we can convey a message."Irish singer Bono, chatting with Laliberte from a U2 concert in Florida, called the former street performer "the first clown in space."Former U.S. vice president and environmental campaigner, Al Gore gave a video presentation on global warming and Brazilian singer songwriter Gilberto Gil sang in Rio de Janeiro.Cirque du Soleil acrobats gave water-themed performances from Montreal and Las Vegas and dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet performed from Moscow in a show streamed on the Internet and broadcast on satellite TV in the United States, Canada and Latin America.Laliberte, 50, whose money-spinning circus shows around the world have made him a billionaire, launched his Montreal-based nonprofit One Drop Foundation in 2007 to increase access to clean water worldwide.Millions of people in developing countries do not have access to clean water, and water-borne illnesses are a persistent problem in many impoverished regions.During the show, online viewers from as far away as Argentina, Australia and India were asked to sign "make a difference" pledges to cut back on bottled water, install water saving devices in toilets and make other environmental savings.Organizers said the event was aimed more at awareness raising than fund raising."I thank you for joining the ripple effect," Laliberte said, ending what he called his "poetic social mission" with a slow-motion shot of droplets of drinking water in the micro-gravity atmosphere of the space station.

-Courtesy:Reuters

Moon of Jupiter could support life, say scientists

Jupiter's moon Europa is flowing with a buried liquid water ocean that contains much more oxygen than previously thought." Enough to possibly support life", scientists say.There is no solid evidence of life for anywhere besides Earth, but Europa has long been considered a good place to look for biological activity.Europa's ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, so scientists wondered whether it has much oxygen, which is thought to be created at the surface by interaction with energetic charged particles from the Sun. Scientists think oxygen is probably necessary for life's metabolic processes, unless some creatures use exotic chemistry involving sulfur or methane. The global ocean on Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth's oceans combined. The new research suggests that there may be a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.To probe how much oxygen might lie in the ocean, Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona studied Europa's surface, which appears to be only about 50 million years old - roughly one percent of the age of the solar system - and continually reforming. He considered three possible resurfacing processes: gradually laying fresh material on the surface, opening cracks which fill with fresh ice from below, and disrupting patches of surface in place and replacing them with fresh material. Using estimates for the production of oxygen at the surface, Greenberg found that the delivery rate into the ocean is likely so fast that the oxygen concentration could exceed that of the Earth's oceans in only a few million years.

These concentrations of oxygen could be great enough to support not only microorganisms, but also larger animals that have greater oxygen demands, Greenberg said.The good news for the question of the origin of life is that there would be a delay of a couple of billion years before the first surface oxygen reached the ocean.

Without that delay, the first pre-biotic chemistry and the first primitive organic structures would be disrupted by oxidation, or rusting. Oxidation is a hazard unless organisms have evolved protection from its damaging effects. A similar delay in the production of oxygen on Earth was probably essential for allowing life to get started here.Greenberg presented his findings at the 41st meeting of the American Astronomical Societies Division for Planetery Sciences in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.

-Courtesy: space.com

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