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Microbes Alive After Being Frozen for 32,000 Years
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years in the Arctic was ready to swim, eat and multiply instantly upon being thawed. Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday. The instant revival abilities mean a future mission, if it found anything on Mars, could conceivably culture it and bring it back alive. Maybe NASA could market them as Martian Sea Monkeys."
Hasn't anyone ever read Andromeda?? Don't thaw them out!!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Wouldn't you be ready to eat and, uh, multiply if you had been without for 32,000 years?
I can imagine the fark headline in a few years.
NASA scientists market Martian microbes as 'Martian sea monkies'. Hilarity ensues.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday Yeah, if the likely problems of salt in the martian see can be solved for these critters, maybe.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
The number of years isn't rounded to 32,768? And you call this a geek site?
But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years, and if it's there, we could do it very cheaply with an uncrewed sample return mission, using present-day technology. It's too bad that the average taxpayer thinks germs from another planet just don't sound very interesting.
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LiveScience is reporting on a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 .... yeah, new... only 32 Kyears...
tardigrades are way cooler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrada
really bored? My blog
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Sounded like a good idea at the time is now a major problem.
Don't bring them back!
I wonder though, which Star Trek and other series sort of gloss over, is that if Martian bacteria did develop, seperate from ourselves, we would probablly lack any auto immune response to be able to combat them. We are the product a millions and billions of years of fighting other life forms for our existence. It would be naive of us to assume that other lifeforms out there would fundementally eat us for lunch, and the reverse being true.
On the other hand, maybe the right of universe is made up of right handed Amino Acids and we will be safe...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
this movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/ The Thing.!?
Sometimes its a good idea to leave that frozen stuff the way you found it.
Maybe martian microbes will give us clues towards a cure for these and other illnesses. We haven't had any luck finding cures here.
I'm also confident in my belief that we could find new minerals on mars, or other planets that could be put to good use as well.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
I sure couldn't handle it, but I know people who could.
This is a great discovery, but only for what it tells us about what things were like 32,000 years ago. Everytime something like this is discovered everybody immediately jumps up and down about life on Mars. At this point it's pretty damn clear that life has found ways to survive everywhere on Earth from the highest clouds to somewhere around the planet's core. But it didn't start there. All of these discoveries are the harshest possible environments on Earth- but they're more like the best conditions on Mars. In fact each new discovery makes the odds of finding life on Mars less- if it's so easy to find life in such amazingly cold and barren conditions why have we still found nothing on Mars that isn't, at best, something that isn't easily made by simple geological (areological?) chemical processes? (But also, sometimes, are by-products of living things.)
Then again no one's gotten a chance to really peak under any Martian rocks. Yet...
take a really long piss.
As a former fundie Creationist nut turned atheist, I can say that they WILL have an answer for it. Creationists tend to come up with very convincing arguments, and - for what it's worth - I'm still not satisfied with the Big Bang, or the theory of evolution, despite the fact that I've rejected creationism.
How I would have viewed it is that the Bible never says that God ONLY created life on Earth. The Bible says the Christ *died for teh sins* of humans, which the Bible implies are only on Earth. In other words, until we find sentient life on other planets, the Christians won't really have to change their tune much.
I want 19 years of my life back...
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Generally religions tend to get round such things in time (though not without much wailing and gnashing of teeth).
Most of them will probably be happy accepting that it is "our kind of life" that is the special thing and that the existance of microbes etc elsewhere doesn't diminish how special us higher beings are. After all, most of them don't seem to like the thought that we and simpler organisms have common origins anyway.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It's all 5, Funny until an entire (human) race gets obliterated by Martian bacteria...
The basic way to date ice samples is pretty similar to "endochronology"
(which is looking at tree rings to determine their age). Ice cores
have similar striations which can be counted to determine the age of the
surrounding ice.
And I couldn't find a link, but I thought at one point
scientists were looking at the air composition inside the ice and comparing
it to historical atmospheric ratios of gasses to date things.
we found that bacteria can live after 32000 years in frozen condition and we are considering the possibility of Martian bacteria, but we still don't know all bacteria living on Earth. We explore other planets and we know very little about our own planet. For example, we recently identified three new bacteria species by closely examining publicly available DNA data. It is surprisingly how easily we can look at a DNA sequence and miss vital information in it. All that data were available to all scientists, but just one understood that there were new species footprints hiding in them.
Why is it that religious leaders can always incite their zealot followers to violence against those who are different, but they can never incite their zealot followers to embrace the tranquillity, harmony, sanctity of life, forgiveness, mercy, tolerance, and passiveness that pretty much all of the major religions are based on?
I've never believed religion to be anything more than a crutch. It's a crutch for the immoral to have a reason to stay moral, just like law and prosecution are reasons for the criminally-minded to avoid crime. It's too bad that the crutch can be used both ways, and can facilitate the very thing the crutch was invented to stop.
Behold, mankind.
"we would probablly lack any auto immune response to be able to combat them."
It's easy enough to speculate on a vice versa: our modern earth bacteria are tough customers, honed by millennia of unending counter-immune war. Wimpy mars bacteria would cower in their meteorite, like preschoolers dumped in a rough biker bar.
Yes, scientific types, I'm blowing smoke, too. Vote me +1, funny.
erm.
I have to agree with others here--it wouldn't bother me a bit (as a person who frequently gets labelled as a right-wing religious nut, but views himself as fairly tolerant and open about various ideas).
To me, there are so many ways that this fits in with what the Bible posits as the creation of the world, and then what my personal beliefs are. To me, it matters VERY LITTLE how the earth was formed and life began. I believe that God is responsible for it, and I also believe that he works through an advanced understanding of physics that makes us look like the savages that are still curious about that hot red stuff, but haven't discovered that you can cook stuff with it.
Would the discovery of microbes on Mars make any difference on religion? No. Would there be a few individuals who would either lose their faith, abandon their belief or otherwise be impacted? Almost certainly. A number of folks would also deny the discovery outright. They are the true nuts (listen to George Nory (sp?) for a sample).
Personally, I say that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, God is also responsible for that, and he created it for a reason, whatever that is. The Bible, for all its worth as a behavioral guide, and wealth of prophecy, fairly stinks as a theological guide. The problem is that the authors mostly wrote for an audience that were familiar with the basic stuff (and therefore don't explain it very well, if at all), or needed correction (in the mind of the author) on specific points. Even direct quotes from Christ are generally of this nature. Many in his audience were well studied on the topics he addressed, and therefore his speech was centered on corrections and changes.
The Old Testament is equally bad. From the very beginning there is an assumption that the reader understands what is meant by God. The most specific and basic areas of instruction are not, however, theological, but commandment. This is all in the Torah. The remainder of the OT is all about the different trials and tribulations of the Jews OR prophecies regarding the Messiah. While some of this does present a moralistic tale, the concept of a clear doctrine and theology has been largely omitted.
Furthermore, the New Testament suffers a different problem. Certain basics are assumed, and then the point is made to convince people that the New way is better than the Old, or to clarify specific points of doctrine that had already been explained.
In a practical sense, this results in there being a large number of views regarding the specifics of basic theology. This also means that there is very little (if any) information on what else God created, other than the general "everything". Personally, I think that we are VERY likely to meet intelligent life in other parts of the universe if we ever get there (I doubt it), and even if it took a radically different form, this would have little impact on my personal views.
That is where, as you probably know, religion and science depart ways--science requires evidence. This is good. Religion requires faith. This can also be good. However, where many religious folks get into trouble is when they deny evidence. This is foolish.
I would write more, but I am VERY tired.
Good night
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Can you even think of a worse idea??
Yes. Let's try to make yogurt with them.
You can try the first batch.
Anakin Simpson: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy--ooh, donuts!
Or then again, maybe everyone else is right and they are just going to kill us.
Of course the bacteria were entirely dessicated, not just frozen, so it's a better model of the martian situation.
That's dendrochronology. "Endochronology" has to do with study of some of the odder properties of thiotimoline.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Ah, yes. The good old cancer microbe.
The abstract of the research paper says that this 'new' bacteria, Carnobacterium pleistocenium, has a 99.8% similarity to Carnobacterium alterfunditum, as determined by gene sequence. I don't have access to this journal, so perhaps someone can fill in the details (how do these frozen bacteria differ from their modern day relatives and/or descendants?).
Phylochronology is a new field that proposes studying molecular evolution on both spatial and temporal scales, using the tools of aDNA and paleontology. Here, however, we have living samples with which to make a comparison. Thus, there's the potential to compare not just nucleotide sequence, but differences in morphology, development, and evolvability.
If evolution is a process requiring billions of years to occur and such exquisitely balanced conditions that life has never been created from raw materials in the lab, wouldn't finding life on other planets make evolution EVEN MORE improbable?
/. are created as needed to meet the demand.
Evolution seems to imply that each occurance of life is an independent event. If p(1)=10^-100 (boosted to 1 since life is observed), then p(2)=10^-200 (boosted to 10^-100)... Having a Creator boosts the probabilities to p(1)=1 (observed), p(2)=?? who knows? No reason not to create again. The Bible gives you places full of plants, animals, angels, cherubim, leviathon; just not people on any other planets.
Both creationism and intelligent design (aka aliens/other almost-godlike-but-not-quite-gods) should get major PR boosts over evolution if life is found on other planets.
I first heard this reasoning ~8 years ago. Take it or leave it.
PS. 93% of the statistics used on
Actually the worst would be someone who died of an extremely virulent form of a virus and was subsequently frozen, then thawed later.
I recall reading about how in some scandinavian country they found a body of a man who died of the 1918 influenza pandemic (one of the worst flu strains ever, millions died) that was frozen in some tundra. They set up a quarantine area around him while he was recovered, lest the extremely contagious and deadly form of the flu in him get loose.
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Thawing out old bacteria is not a new discovery--what's interesting here is that it is older bacteria.
The more interesting question about possible unicellular organisms in Mars is whether they share a common ancestor with Earth's unicellular organisms or did they develop independently of each other. If there is a link/common ancestor, then the currently weak theory of panspermia (life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores) would have a big boost in support. Also see this article about possible space bugs written over 2 years ago.
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Uh, check your facts budy. Here's a link since you obviously can't use google.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We have 32k year old bacteria discovered in Antarctica that wake from the deep freeze and people take this time to bash religion for inciting violence and being a mental crutch for the weak willed. Very easy to make statements like that on slashdot, but try doing it in a forum where a majority of the people you're speaking to are "crippled". I'm tired of hearing it, and I'm sure people are tired of responses to responses like mine, condemning said responses with a conscending moral tone.
BTW I can't help but parallel this story to Jesus's life, crucifixion, and resurrection. I for one, welcome our new microbe lord.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
1. It's "possible ice sea", not "ice sea". The paper hasn't even been peer reviewed yet, let alone actually examined for the presence of ice, let alone liquid water. There is just as much reason to believe that it's *not* an ice sea (similarity to regions viewed as volcanic flows, the rate of sublimation of even insulated ice as Mars' equatorial temperatures, and greatly exaggerated claims about things like the viscosity of ice vs. lava).
What's with this culture of "one scientific team says so, so it is an absolute fact"? That's why you all were suckered by the "methane from life" claim that turned out to have been a misinterpreted overheard conversation at a party.
2. Why was Mars even mentioned at all? We're talking about Earth life here; if there is any life on Mars, it will likely be playing by significantly different "rules" at a molecular level. This discovery on its own was neat; no need to try and jazz it up by trying to distantly connect it with Mars.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
More likely these things aren't up to the 1337 5ki112 today's evolved fauna (bacteria,virii,fungi) and wouldn't last long outside the petri dish. Makes for some what sci-fi, but what you have today is the stuff tough enough to last through whatever nature and errant meteorites have chucked at it.
On another note, immortality is overrated. Survive 32K years and you get to swim around a petri dish among strangers. Hmph.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years
This is obviously a meaning for the word new I hadn't previously come across
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
Bacteria 1: "Yawwwn...good morning..."
Bacteria 2: "ZZZzzzzZZZzzzz..."
Bacteria 3: "Morning!"
Bacteria 1: "Hey, wake up!"
Bacteria 2: "ZZZzzz...aaahhh...morning. How long this time?"
Bacteria 3: "Uh...looks like...32,000 years."
Bacteria 1: "Well that's a lot shorter than last time."
Bacteria 2: "Yes, it is. I wonder why things warmed up so quickly."
Bacteria 3: "Well any-hoo, you boys ready?"
Bacteria 1: "I most certainly am..."
Bacteria 2: "Let's get it done quickly, I want to go back to sleep."
Bacteria 3: "Okay then, let the next Extinction Commence!!!"
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Is it just me who reads "Microbes" as "Microsoft" (I guess it's because the latter is much more common on Slashdot than the former)? Read it that way twice already, actually. And it even makes sense!
Ooh, never mind, found it. Yay for google scholar:
= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7538699&dopt=Citation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber.
Cano RJ, Borucki MK.
A bacterial spore was revived, cultured, and identified from the abdominal contents of extinct bees preserved for 25 to 40 million years in buried Dominican amber. Rigorous surface decontamination of the amber and aseptic procedures were used during the recovery of the bacterium. Several lines of evidence indicated that the isolated bacterium was of ancient origin and not an extant contaminant. The characteristic enzymatic, biochemical, and 16S ribosomal DNA profiles indicated that the ancient bacterium is most closely related to extant Bacillus sphaericus.
This is no biggy. The BBC has a report today on microbes found 400m below the earth's surface inside solid rock that are at least sixteen million years old. That's right, the same actual cells, not the colony, individual bacteria cells... 'practically immortal', as the article says. The discoverers speculate that life may originally have evolved underfound as the surface was being regularly sterilised by impacts in the early epochs of earth's history. I leave the implications for life on Mars as an exercise for the reader ;)
Think the flu brought to America by the conquistadors/missionaries/colonists/etc. Something that for the europeans was just a flu, was deadlier to the Indians than the black plague back in Europe. It killed more of them than the conquistadors, wars, and inquisition combined.
"The differenter the better" is good and fine, but at one point it becomes "different enough to not be detected". The immune system and its cells aren't a complete genetics lab, complete with a team of top-notch scientists, fully analyzing every cell and deciding if it belongs there or not. It reacts to certain patterns, but doesn't react at all to others. Things that they never had to detect, they might not. Or not reliably.
Or to put it otherwise, that too is the result of evolution, rather than intelligent design. Being able to detect and solve problems that actually could kill the animal before it reproduced, were obviously favoured by natural selection. Having an immune system that reacts to viruses and bacteria you meet every day, now that's the kind of thing that natural selection is all about.
On the other hand, having an immune system capable of reacting to fundamentally different stuff, that's never even been there in millions of years, that's something _not_ enforced by natural selection. You can be born, grow up, reproduce, and die, without ever needing to heal from a martian flu.
In fact, au contraire: there's a good evolutionary reason to _not_ evolve an over-reacting immune system. See the auto-immune Type 1 diabetes where your pancreas is destroyed by your own immune system. Individuals with an immune system even more strict than that, got themselves out of the gene pool.
And evolution can be even more perverse than that. There are a whole bunch of genetic diseases or other disfunctions, which didn't get filtered out by billions of years of selection, nor get defenses evolved against them, because they made no difference in reproduction rates. Either because:
A) The're very rare recessive genes. Individuals could be "the fittest", even while carrying these genes. Or
B) They kill you after the age where you've already reproduced. E.g., skin cancer. Stuff that could kill you in your thirties-fourties wasn't a priority to evolve defenses against, when those hominids lived less than half that.
Basically all I'm saying is: I wouldn't be _that_ sure. There are good chances that, yes, the germs from mars would be the first against the wall. But as history shows, there are also non-zero chances that they won't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
-kgj
Try being alive for 16 million years!
I am trying as hard as I can. So far I'm doing perfectly, but I suspect I haven't collected enough data points yet to accurately predict my eventual success or lack thereof.