Slashdot Mirror
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.
Find free books.
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
It's Encino Paramecium
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
--
matt
<insert sig here>
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.
take a really long piss.
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
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.
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.
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!
"Suppose that, in a rather obviously impressive way, God descended from Heaven. Suppose he drops by your place and performs a few miracles. Maybe then he beams you down to Hell for a 5-minute tour, either Star Trek style or via the Earth just opening up for a moment..."
Okay, I don't normally, but I'll bite this time...
If God exists and did this, or part of this, and it was obvious to all of those involved that he actually did these things and that there was absolutely no other way that these things could have happened then those involved would have a reason to believe in him. Fact of the matter is that none of these things have happened to me or to anyone I know, and those that I know who claim that God did something in their lives that's overly special are either crazy or are so bad at stastics that they're not accounting for the 10x number of bad things that happen for the one "miracle" that is simply fortuitous coincidence.
The British didn't defeat the Spanish Armada in Queen Elisabeth I's day because God helped, they had several unexpected advantages. Likewise, 1910-1920 era Germany lost the first World War despite asserting to themselves in some national motto "God is Great." The man referred to as "Comical Ali" the Iraqi Information Minister continually ranted how the Americans were losing, and how Allah was going to see the Iraqi army to victory over the Infidels.
This is the same damn argument that Science has had with religion from the earliest days of the discipline; skeptics don't blindly accept "truth" simply because people insist that it's true. Continual restatement of a position doesn't have anything to do with reality.
Show me one 'miracle' and I'll show you ten anti-miracles, like my 30 year old friend who was a vegetarian and otherwise the picture of health who died of completely natural causes, not realising that she had pulmonary hypertension until it was far, far too late to do anything about it.
In the mean time, I'm not going to believe something transcribed by hand over generations, across multiple languages, and at times by organizations with manipulative agendas. It was also originally written by people who didn't understand the natural world like we do. I don't doubt many of the positive "lessons" that are the ultimate theme of the parables, but the exact verbatim message can't be literally interpreted in my opinion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Of course the bacteria were entirely dessicated, not just frozen, so it's a better model of the martian situation.
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.
Linux at home
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.
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 =-
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.
Evolution is what happened _after_ the first cells were created from the raw materials.
And either of them doesn't really involve anything spectacularly improbable, and which can then be ascribed to a God/demi-God/alien/whatever. It just needs time. And time it had. Billions of years of it.
Statistics and large numbers are a funny thing. If you're one in a million, there are 6,000 just like you world-wide. Think about it. Because therein lies your answer: the key is very large numbers, not divine intervention. (And also that's the usual problem why people just don't get it: human brains has trouble working with really large numbers.)
Well, the same applies to both evolution and abiogenesis. No matter how improbable a mutation is to happen _and_ get passed on, given enough specimens over millions of years, it _will_ eventually happen. (Note, I said "improbable", not "impossible".)
Smaller mutations are easier: they happen all the time. An animal is born who's slightly smaller and faster than its parents. Another is born with slightly bigger claws. Another one is born who's slightly bigger and stronger, but needs more food. Etc.
From there it's merely a question of selection. Some of those deviations will give the animal more chances to survive and have offspring, some will make it less likely.
This affects the others too: the foxes that have an easier time finding food, might leave less food for the ones who don't. The mutated gazelle which runs faster, makes the _others_ an easier prey for lions. Etc. Essentially the most fit mutation puts the others at a disadvantage.
And you don't even need to believe in Darwinism to see that in action: artifficial selection is based on exactly the same kind of natural diversity, except the criterion who's the fittest is an artifficial human criterion, and the culling out the "unfit" is much faster.
See starting with dogs that looked like wolves, and ending up with the Pekinese. That was dilligent selection of those random mutations that were the closest to the desired end result: something (A) looking like a Chinese dragon, and (B) small enough to fit under the Emperor's tea table. It worked. Enough generations of selection turned a wolf ino the Pekinese.
Well, the same happens naturally too, only slower.
And here's the fun part: trying the same independently on two planets doesn't reduce the chances in any way. Your chances of rolling a 6 with a die are not influenced by my also rolling my own dice at the same time. The fact that you rolled a 6 doesn't say I can't roll a 6 too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.