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Extreme Bugs Found In Slag Dump
lonefox_illuminus writes "The world's most alkaline lifeforms are living in contaminated water in the U.S. These microbial little fellas are able to exist in an environment as harsh and toxic as caustic soda."
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the scientists are looking in the wrong places. I recommend the follow short list for locating the most toxic life forms:
1) capitol hill
2) the law firm of "Boies, Schiller & Flexner"
Slag Dump
Extreme Bugs
Alkaline Lifeform
Caustic Soda
Contaminated Water
Harsh and Toxic
Microbial Little
The most extreme posters have been found to live in caustic environments such as "Slashdot". They thrive in flames, insults, gross-out posts, and even first posts. They are known in the scientific world as "posterus slashdotterus". They are a dangerous species and should be handled with care. If you meet on, please call your local police authority immediately.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
... congress are breeding, are they going to put a stop to it?
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
It goes to show that life can live anywhere it wants. The depth of the oceans, and the acidic worlds of a slag dump.
Pretty Pictures!
Notice that all of these extremophiles (dwellers in deep sea vents, caustic soda, stone, and slashdot flames) are microorganisms. They have neither brain nor backbone.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Extremophile bacteria are found in all sorts of extreme places. Some can live in jet fuel (they corrode the tanks and require antibiotics in jet fuel). Others live in the acidic high-temperature hotsprings in Yellowstone. And entire ecosystems thrive around the 600 degree F "black smokers" in deep-sea thermal vents.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If Slag is seeing a lot of bugs in their dumps, it could be because they aren't writing enough unit tests?
... I must confess that my first reaction was along the same lines. The whole description had me confused for 2 or 3 minutes until it finally got through my work-brain filter.
I need a vacation
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
"Extreme Bugs Found In Slag Dump"
I've written code that could be described like that after it crashed and took everything else with it...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
we must make sure that the slag dump is a protected environment. Any work in cleaning up the dump could result in the extinction of entire species of bacteria.
Perhaps we could set up other toxic slag dump wildlife preserves in other places throughout the world.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I don't know much about these kinds of bugs but I used to live in an area that was close to an old copper mine. The community tried all kinds of things to deal with the slag, including planting sunflowers (a.k.a. Jerusalem Artichokes) in it. IANABiologist, does anyone know if these things could actually be used to clean up slag? The article didn't really go in depth.
Living in extreme environments is one thing, but completely different respiration systems is another thing entirely. This article reminds me of one I saw here. Apparently, some microbes discovered utilize iron as opposed to oxygen in order to sustain themselves. That's quite an accomplishment.
Well seeing as the bugs live off of the current envornment by "cleaning it up" they would be exterminating themselves.
The concept of planting sunflowers or other species of "normal" plants is that life attampts to maintain an environment where it will survive. Thus sunflowers would attempt to change the slag dump into a envornment where it can live and thus so can we. These bug, in there attempts for survival, whould maintain the alkaline nature of the dump and thus be counter productive.
All your BASE are belong to us!
I for one welcome our new Alkaline Lifeform overlords!
There is no evidence that these bacteria evolved at all. This is just another case of scientific zealots bending the facts to fit their evolution-dogma. The scientific preisthood refuse to publish any paper that openly discusses the merits of creationist theory.
Imagine an alkaline petri dish filled with a beowolf-cluster of cells!
Poll, what should the scientific name of these bacteria be?
() Coyboydacea Neilii
() Cowboyacca Neileria
() Cowboydium Neiliarum
() Cowboyira Neilacillus
() Cowboyus Neilidifera
Natalite Portman, petrified and alkalined!
Alkaline lifeforms are dying!
(1) Adapt to an alkaline enviornment.
(2) ???
(3) PROFIT!
Press release:
It would have been IMPOSSIBLE for these bacteria to have adapted to this toxic sludge-pool with without the missappropriation of SCO's intellectual property. SCO's native habitat is toxic sludge-pools and only SCO possesses the genes required to thrive in this enviornment.
In Soviet Russia alkaline sludge-pools adapt to YOU!
Bacteria can survive corrosive alkaline envionments, they can survive 600 degree temperatures, they can survive intense radiation, they can survive powerful acids, they can survive toxic heavy metals, but they couldn't survive the SLASHDOT EFFECT!
Photo: bacteria living in an alkaline enviornment
(Link intentionally broken)
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Although life can exist in these environments, did it actually arise in these environments or did it evolve from non-extreme ones? In the case that life could spontaneously evolve in these harsh conditions (harsh to me - perhaps not Cowboy Neal), then I would expect life everywhere in the universe. However, on the other hand, if they have to originate in 'nicer' climes and then evolve, then our search becomes more difficult.
It's just that I find it difficult to believe that the components that make up life could actually form in these extreme heat/pH conditions.
Just my cowardly 2 cents...
Nice try karma whore.
Best... Post... Evar !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
I can't remember what program it was exactly on. But, there was talk about how life on Earth started next to underwater volcanic vents. They managed to life off the chemistry in the oceans rather then sunlite. The process is known as chemosynthesis. If such a theory holds true, perhaps the moon Europa has life sustained from geothermic energy.
Life is not for the lazy.
Caustic Soda is already a punk band name:
Caustic Soda
Luckily, the other names are up for grabs (according to Google).
IANAL, but I play one on
The plants function as a contaminant sink - they are capable of absorbing trace amounts of elements/minerals from the soil. If you harvest the biomass, then you collect some of the pollutants along with it.
It has been done in gold mine tailings with alfalfa: http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/research/highlig hts_archive/alfalfa.html
Although, I don't know if this is effective enough to warrant much commercial development. It works in small amounts, but I seriously doubt it is used for much other than to fob off the greenies.
A greenie website for more info: http://www.aibs.org/bioscience/bioscience-archive/ vol45/green.clean.html
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I don't know about "spontaneous" evolution. These microbes probably have a life cycle measured in days or hours.
Most likely the slag-dumpage occured over time as a result of industrial or mining processes. As the pH level is gradually increased, microbes that are not alkaline resistant are killed off. Those that are alkaline resistant, manage to live.
Higher-lifeform evolution seems like an extended process to us, because mammals, reptiles, and amphibs have lifecycles that are measurable in years.
We simply use the same evolutionary logic that applies to "real" animals. Just compress it down to the number of lifecycles necessary to establish a genetically different population (instead of measuring evolution in terms of years or geologic epochs).
(+1, used the word DUMPAGE)
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
All life on earth seems to have a common ancestor, it seems very unlikely that there are species of different origin in existance today.
However, it is still very valuable information that life is possible under these circumstances. If you would start out with a lifeless world that has extreme conditions such as pH or temperature, it is at least possible for life to exist there.
As for the formation of life, we only have one real example: life on earth. The conditions required for life to form are therefor very hard to determine, this would require observing numerous planets and studying which ones have life and which don't.
They basically said: They don't understand how I could live in this toxic-waste hell hole surrounded by half-finished beer bottles and seven-day-old pizza.
So, anyway, I pointed them at this article.
TDz.
I live in a slag dump you insensitive clod!
we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively - bill hicks
The world's most alkaline lifeforms are living in contaminated water in the U.S.
I think I've been in this guy's apartment...
One cell, out of countless zillions, gets zapped in a favourable way, and you have, in a shortish time scale, a colony. As the environment changed, this would be repeated, who knows how many intervening forms there were between something normal and this.
It is also quite possible that many odd single-cell organisms exist in nature, but don't develop into noticeable quantities until the environment is optimum. Strange things abount at the volcanic vents on the sea floor, for example, maybe even around the caustic soda volcano in the African Rift Valley, and it is not impossible to postulate mechanisms whereby one of these could have been transported. It is a long journey for a bacterium, but not necessarily for a geologist's boot, for example.
An interesting experiment would be to take some of these, and put them in an environment which is then slowly brought back to normal. If the mutations are due to an equilibrium process, successive generations ought to contain a small proportion of their precursor, all the way back to the original.
BTW the environment is nowhere near caustic soda or paint stripper, a pH of 12.8 in nature is quite abnormal but not quite that extreme. Calcium hydroxide is only lime, the stuff you mix with cement to make bricklaying mortar a bit more useable, it does not immediately burn human skin like caustic soda (sodium hydroxide). Medium to long term, it would do you no good of course. Farmers put it on their fields to deal with acid soils. I don't think that when they do thisw, they kill all or the organisms in the soil. The alkaline earth elements (second column of the periodic table) and their compounds are very much less reactive than the alkalais (first column). Having said that, please don't play with calcium oxide (quicklime)!
Nevertheless, an interesting discovery, but it would be better without the sensationalism.