I don’t think the top speed is 6 mph! It is a Mercedes and the BBC said the top speed was ‘classified’. 😀

it has a limmiter for working in crowds , probably removable , but would you drive it faster with that weight of bullet proof glass that high up ??

god is on his side !!!

after all nothing says you have faith in god like 3” of bullet proof glass

it will have been carriage built with all consideration for transport and quick assembly although it may not even strip down

with the time between visits to individual countries it may even go by sea

and travel on a recovery truck between engagements once there

as the vehicle is limited to 6 mph

however i would have prefered seing the original british popemobile

the leyland truck last i heard it was auctioned from the albion truck museum when it closed ( unsure of its whereabouts or survival now ) but what a vehicle !!!

http://www.thomsonroddick.com/auction/2006/0901/popemobile.jpg

can’t it will be too tricky to make it stay put whilst measuring it !!:D

Now it would be foolish for me to argue with the likes of Carl Sagen! 😀 But…

…taking the ‘first few hundred million years’ of Earth’s history as 1000,000,000 years then 3,000,000,000,000,000 tons of comets (water) is going to be arriving at a rate of 3,000,000 tons a year!

Wasn’t the Tunguska explosion in Siberia in 1908 that flattened 2000 square kilometres of forest supposed to be a comet (estimated as ‘a few tens of metres’ across)? So, I’m sure we’d notice 3,000,000 tons of comets arriving every year! :diablo:

🙂

it is odd to think that all that water if demonstrated in size comparisons

the total volume of all the earths water grouped together

would be close to the equivalent of a small marble on a tennis ball !!

so although there are deep areas seas in general must be reasonably shallow in relation to distance travelled !!

it realy is one of those depending on ability things !!

if you are a modeller of good ability it probably won’t be worth it !!

however combine 2 huge wyvern fans with money burning a hole in thier pockets , and an ability to screw up even skirting board painting

then watch the bidding war proceede:diablo:

same as paintings or anything if you can’t yourself , pay someone else !!

trumpeter are not a cheap manufacturer and there are a lot of skilled hours in the build

why shouldn’t he make something on it ???

it is more original than a corgi one and look at the price of corgis !!

it may be an exageration braught about by an ad campaign on uk tv

but this sheds some light on the extreemes life starting can be found at

and a possibility that it may have been here without importing it

[A PUBLISHED CORRECTION HAS BEEN ADDED TO THIS STORY.]A newly discovered microscopic creature from the deep sea can survive in heat of up to 266 degrees Fahrenheit, a new record for life on earth, University of Massachusetts researchers reported yesterday.

The one-celled organism not only lived but grew successfully at 121 degrees centigrade, the temperature inside doctors’ sterilization equipment, long believed to be hot enough to kill any life form.

“This is like breaking the 4-minute mile – it’s a real benchmark,” said Matthew Kane, who oversaw the National Science Foundation grant that funded the research.

The iron-breathing microbe, named Strain 121 for its ability to thrive at the temperature of a medical autoclave, joins a growing menagerie of “extremophiles,” exotic creatures that thrive in what to humans are extremes of heat and cold. It was collected in the Pacific Ocean 200 miles off Puget Sound, where vents from deep in the earth unleash tremendous heat into the cold ocean.

The discovery of Strain 121 does not imply that sterilization for canned foods or medical instruments must be raised to higher temperatures, however. At room or body temperature, “it doesn’t die but it can’t do anything because it’s just too cold,” said Derek Lovley, head of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and coauthor of the paper reporting the discovery in today’s issue of the journal Science.

Lovley said the existence of Strain 121 “expands the window of conditions under which we might be able to find life.”

That means there may be organisms living far deeper beneath the earth’s surface than previously thought, as they could survive the higher temperatures nearer the planet’s core.

Strain 121 may also have implications for theories of the evolution of life on earth because something like it could have thrived when the planet was younger and much hotter. Its iron breathing could have been “the first form of microbial respiration as life evolved on a hot, early Earth,” the Science paper posits.

The heat-loving organism could also eventually yield some practical uses; such exotic microbes offer the prospect of improving industrial processing of paper or medications, and even cleaning hot contaminants, scientists say.

Researchers say they may well find more extreme creatures in the future. “Will 121 be the upper limit of life?” asked Dr. Craig Cary, an expert on high-temperature extremo philes at the University of Delaware. “I don’t believe it will be. I believe more people like Derek and my colleagues will continue to look and continue to find them, but it’s going to be harder and harder.”

The hard part for Dr. Lovley and his coauthor, Kazem Kashefi, was getting Strain 121 to survive and grow.

“It takes an enormous amount of time and an incredible amount of talent and perseverance to develop and understanding of what this organism needs to grow,” Dr. Cary said. “These guys have been on the planet for over 3 billion years, so they’ve had a lot of time to figure it out.”

Strain 121 is only about one micron (one millionth of a meter) across and looks something like a balloon with a dozen whipping strings. It belongs to an ancient branch of life known as Archaea, which are similar to bacteria and often live in seemingly inhospitable environments.

Lovley said his lab plans to name the creature after it completes and publishes a fuller study.

Though he and his colleagues are highly familiar with the weird world of extremophiles, Lovley said that “the emotion we had when we found out it grew in the autoclave was amazement.”

“You’re taught from day one in biology that the temperature of an autoclave will kill any life,” he said, “and we put it in there and brought it out 10 hours later, and it’s still alive.”

Carey Goldberg can be contacted at [email]goldberg@globe.com[/email]

SIDEBAR: DISCOVERY FROM THE DEEP PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA. [CORRECTION – DATE: Sunday, August 17, 2003: * Correction: Because of a graphic artist’s error, some temperatures were incorrect in a graphic in Friday’s City & Region section about the discovery of an organism that can live at extreme temperatures. According to The Sizesaurus, the melting point of gold is 1,945 degrees Fahrenheit, molten lava is 3,150 degrees, and the surface of the sun is 10,340 degrees.)

you need liquid water for life:D

not necesarily the case they are now proving that some bacterias can survive in molten lava !!!

just life as we know it can’t !!

and there’s the key , to our knowledge !! not necesarily the truth elsewhere if there is life out there

i think there is but travell between us will remain impossible !!

Life came to earth on a comet?

As an example of this where would you think that life would be likely to originate, on a planet with plenty of water and a relatively constant temperature orbiting a sun for billions of years…

remember !! the earth had to start somewhere your point above was far and away the case from the beggining

at some point life had to enter the equation and a commet is just as pheasible as any other source

it is a unsolved mystery and things we have to remember are even scientists proove themselves wrong

point being the recent discovery (after saying our sun was the largest !! ) of a sun about a hundred times larger

never mind ehh !! it was probably hid behind something !!