The world's most ancient organisms

Research by Rachel Sussman

This Yareta plant just looks like a few boulders covered in moss, but it is in fact a shrub, with incredibly dense branches and clusters of green leaves at their ends. The big surprise is that this particular individual is over 3,000 years old, as are many Yareta plants, and only grows one millimeter per year.

Rachel Sussman has spent the past 5 years travelling the world researching the oldest living organisms that are 2,000 years old, or older. Her works began as both an artistic and scientific curiosity into global species longevity, an untouched area of research. Her inspiration came from the Jomon Sugi tree, a 2,180 year old tree sheencountered while visiting Japan. It's artistic and scientific beauty sparked an interest in organisms which are older than the year zero.

The oldest tortious is a mere 175 years old. A recently discovered giant clam was 405 years old (until it died in the lab), but these are just adolescents compared with the ancient plants and coral found on earth:

Brain Coral - This particular coral was found 18 meters down of the cost of the United States. It is 2,000 years old and was very lucky to escape the recent oil leak.

Armillaria (The humongous fungus) - This a predatory fungus thats hunts trees and is one of the worlds largest organisms. It kills trees in a circular pattern, slowly strangling a tree and cutting of the flow of water and nutrients. This one was dated as 2,400 years old.

The underground Forest - This is actually a tree, but highly adapted to the dry, bush like conditions that so often catch fire spontaneously. What you see is only the very top of the tree poking up through the soil, the rest is submerged below. This way only the leaves become singed by fire. This tree is 13,800 years old.

Pando Tree, clonal colony Quacking Aspen (The trembling giant) - The picture suggests a forest but genetic tests have shown this to be a single organism (hence a clonal colony). Each stem has grown from one giant root system which is 80,000 years old!

So, whats the oldest known living thing on earth? The prize goes to Siberian

Actinobacteria, a bacterium that lives within permafrost (soil below freezing). One sample is estimated to be

between 400,000 and 600,000 years old. Actinobacteria can perform DNA repair at, or below, freezing temperatures making them remarkable organisms, but also incredible vulnerable to rising global temperatures.

Ancient organisms are a living record of the past and wake up call for action in the future. They have survived for millennia in deserts, permafrost, and tops of mountains. Survived every natural disaster and human interference, but for how much longer? The need to preserve these wonders is undeniable.

For more information visit Rachel's web site

The game layer: the next step in social networking

Presented by Seth Priebatsch

The recent explosion in social networking is difficult to overlook, no matter how much an individual may want to. The network, almost single handedly defined by facebook, is complete in its construction and connects together thousands of people in what is refereed to as an open graph. The next step will be the building of a `game layer' that uses game dynamics to motivate and influence peoples behaviour. The framework around which this is built will become increasingly important.

The game layer is already well under construction on a global scale. It exists in the form of credit card schemes, air miles, loyalty cards, Tesco club cards etc. They are all designed to change our spending behaviour using game dynamics to benefit the respective companies. But the design of the game layer so far is cluttered with badly designed frameworks.

Game dynamics, when used correctly, can be very powerful forces in peoples lives. Lets look at some examples of game dynamics as they are used today:

1) Appointment dynamics - to succeed a player must do a predefined action at a predefined place\time. By introducing such a dynamic you can control what and when people do certain actions. For example, a happy hour at a bar makes people buy drinks at a predefined time. Or, to take a facebook example, the game Farmville forces users to return at certain times to water crops, otherwise they wilt. This may seem innocent, but the thousands of people who play this game can be summoned at any interval the designers wish, a very powerful force in the online world.

2) Influence and status - the ability of one player to modify another's actions through social pressure. For example, if a friend has the latest iphone it somehow makes them a better person, so i need one too. This is often used in computer gaming whereby a more successful player will have a higher rank and a prettier badge to show it.

3) Progression dynamic - success is granularly displayed and progress is made by completing short, simple, itemised tasks. Often, the desire to fill a progress bar is enough to drive a user to complete tasks. An insane example is World of warcraft, on which an average player will spent 6.5 hours a day to gradually improve his character, and pay for the fun of doing so.

The last decade was the decade of social networking. The next decade will be the decade of games. Game dynamics are a powerful tool for influencing behaviour and they will have much deeper affects on users than social networking alone. We should be conscious of the game layer and help built it well and responsibly.