Slashdot Mirror
Strange Bacteria Sustains Itself Without Sunlight
Hahnsoo writes "A colony of bacteria found 2.8 kilometers below the Earth's surface in a South African gold mine is able to sustain itself without energy from the Sun. While sub-surface colonies of microorganisms utilizing sulfur (mostly near deep sea hydrothermal vents) is not new, this particular colony is unusual. The colony does it by relying on radioactive uranium to split water into hydrogen gas. Thus, instead of solar energy and photosynthesis, this species relies on radioactive materials and sulfur/hydrogen to facilitate its energy needs. There is some speculation about life on other planets in the article as well."
What is this sunlight you speak of?
We manage to sustain ourselves using colonies of microorganisms utilising twinkie bars and coke (mostly near mom's fridge).
We rely on radiation from our CRT monitors and heat from mom's washing machine to act as a catalyst converting the food bars into into methane gas. Thus instead of having a nice basement, its a desolate wasteland where noone would dare to tread.
There is some speculation about how life evolved inside such places (or should that be devolved).
liqbase
So now we have completely different lifeforms available does that mean we have to go and kill them?
In the end, It's all bovine dung you know
Do they run linux?
A colony of bacteria found 2.8 kilometers below the Earth's surface in a South African gold mine is able to sustain itself without energy from the Sun.
Why is this news? Clearly you've never been to a Linux User's Group meeting.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"... this species relies on radioactive materials and sulfur/hydrogen to facilitate its energy needs"
How you want me to think that those 'radioactive materials and sulfur/hydrogen' components weren't somehow reliant on sunlight at some point in the past?
Admit it or not, but the SB have and will continue to rely on sunlight as part of their food chain.
So, now we know who (or what) is going to survive after nuclear holocost.
Lets join them, they will be winners.
It's life Jim, but not as we know it!
Is uranium naturally radioactive or is this human produced nuclear waste? For now, I'll assume the former.
In case it is about 'normal' uranium, would it be viable to use its radioactvity as a power source without the creepy fission reactions? Would it then also be possible to turn human nuclear waste into a useful energy source? Or is the amount of energy released by radioactivity too small to turn into useful work?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
So the real question is can we engineer these bacteria to be more productive and then, rather than pumping oil out of the ground, we can run our cars off hydrogen out of the ground. It may not be totally green but at least we can keep the genetically engineered, radioactive slime a couple of miles underground (that is, until it learns to crawl :-)
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
I for one welcome our radi... no, sod off.
(a) It's naturally radioactive. Also, from TFA: "Coauthors of the present paper learned of a new water-filled fracture inside a South African gold mine near the Johannesburg metropolitan area and viewed it as an opportunity to study subsurface rock uncontaminated by human activities."
(b) It's not practical to use its radioactivity as a power source, however, because it's only mildly radioactive in the natural state; said another way, it's not appreciably warm, so the amount of heat given off of natural uranium due to its radioactivity is negligible.
(c) Most (nearly all) human-generated nuclear waste has the same answer as (b); of that that is appreciably warm, there's too little of it to be useful as a power source.
(d) You got it.
Note that the bacteria do not use radioactivity directly, but rather use hydrogen from their environment, made from decomposing water exposed to radioactivity, as an energy source. Again from TFA: "This fracture water contained hydrocarbons and hydrogen not likely to have been created through biological processes, but rather from decomposition of water exposed to radiation from uranium-bearing rocks."
Sulphur and "radioactive materials" were all once formed inside stars, but they were never dependant on sunlight. SO you're still wrong. :P
I go away for a couple of weeks and my fridge grows green slime without any aid from sunlight at all.
Deleted
I love these kinds of stories. We can blow this planet up, it can ice up to the equator or even shift on its axis and life will survive and take another shot in a few thousand millennia.
On a practical note I wonder what a handful of this particular type would make of a nuclear waste pile...
(Slashdotters who already know this can feel free to ignore it. Everyone has to learn science sometime, if you had the good fortune to learn it years ago no reason to jump on someone who hasn't yet.)
Yes, uranium is naturally radioactive. Much of nature is naturally radioactive, including you, incidentally. There is a certain amount of what is called "background radiation" around you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there would still be even if no human had ever drawn a single breath. Uranium just happens to be quite a bit more radioactive than you are, owing to its nuclear structure.
Now, uranium like most metals doesn't come in handily available lumps in the natural world, but is found in ores: the ore is called pitchblend, in the case of uranium. Humans extract pitchblend (at a ratio of a few pounds of pitchblend to a lot of tons of boring old rock), extract the uranium, and then refine/enrich the uranium so that we get the exact isotopes of it we need for our nuclear power/weapons needs. (Isotopes are the same element, except with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus. Different isotopes of elements have vastly different radioactive properties. For example, the most common isotope of hydrogen isn't radioactive at all, and your body contains a heck of a lot of the stuff. The least common isotope of hydrogen, tritium, has two neutrons in it, and is used for making hydrogen bombs.)
So there are essentially three ways an atom can alter the configuration of its nucleus and release energy. Number one, it splits off into two atoms (fission). Number two, it fuses with another atom (fusion). Number three, it spits out something that was in its nucleus (radioactive decay -- there are a couple of types of this, producing radiation of various levels of danger -- alpha decay, for example, can be stopped with a piece of paper, gamma decay on the other hand will penetrate a meter of concrete). You can cause fission by manipulating radioactive decay in the right way, but it will happen really bloody slowly over time regardless -- uranium, for example, has a half life in the millions of years, which means that of a given sample it will take millions of years for one half of it to radiate and transform into whatever the next step is. Now, a bit of pitchblend just sitting on the counter isn't going to be useful for much of anything, although if you handle it for a few months or years you're at an elevated risk of getting cancer (and if you get radium, a radioactive gas, in your lungs, well, its less than good for you). So you can't, say, just chuck it in a specially designed miniature nuclear power plant and have it power your refrigerator. But a comparitively small amount of the concentrated, refined stuff (a few tens or hundreds of kilograms, as I recall), plus a nuclear plant designed to accelerate the fission faster than it occurs in nature, can literally power a city for years.
Nuclear power, even with the downside of producing harmful radiation (which is almost totally controllable, incidentally), is already very useful. Several countries and many, many communities are dependent on it to keep the lights running, the computers playing WoW, and air conditioners conditioning, the welders welding, and all those electricity-using things modern society depends on. If you're an environmentally concerned sort, you might also be happy to know that it generates extraordinarily little pollution compared to the refinement and combustion of fossil fuels.
This lesson in nuclear chemistry has been brought to you by the letter U and the number 235.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
There is no reason why the can't sustain themselves.
I, for one, welcome our nuclear-powered bacterial underlords!
Comments along the lines of "we've found life in such & such extreme enviroment which makes life elsewhere in the universe more likely." Hmm , I'm not convinced. Thing is , I think life evolved in a fairly benevolent enviroment (and even then it took quite a few billion years) where organic molecules had time to arrange themselves into precursors living cells. I very much doubt this would have happened in somewhere blasted with radiation/intense heat/cold/whatever where extremophiles live. However once the mechanisms of life are up and running THEN things can adapt to extreme enviroments because they have a number of pre existing mechanisms that be mutated to do allow this , but that doesn't mean that these mechanisms could have evolved in the extreme enviroment in the first place. Its a bit like an Alien arriving on earth and seeing humans standing on top of Everest and then assuming that a large ape evolved 7 miles up in freezing cold and low oxygen conditions. Adaptation to an enviroment is NOT the same as emergence within it.
There is some speculation about life on other planets in the article as well
There always is, isn't there.
I think that more research should go into seeing if the bacteria could break down nuclear waste. And if it can't, at least drop a bucket full on North Korea!
It creates a gruesome ending for those who are nearby and afar.
Read radical news here
...Strange bacterium sustains itself without sunlight?
Anyone?
as ./ers go oooh and aaaahh at biological processes and biology in general. :)))
there is life outside silicium.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Groucho Marx
"Hydrogen gas is highly energetic if it reacts with oxygen or other oxidants like sulfate, as the Hindenburg disaster demonstrated."
What's the point of adding these sorts of comments? It's it widely understood that the actual flames captured on the footage was in fact from the covering and paint of the Hindenburg, not the hydrogen which would have very rapidly dissapated in the first place?
The independence of Ukraine and the economical crisis in the former Eastern Soviet Union were also influenced by Ukraine.
They live off one of the products of nuclear decay.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I, for one, welcome our new uranium powered bacteria overlords
It's a plot! W (a.k.a. "The Kid"), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Ill, they're all just puppets of these evil bacteria who need nuclear war to satisfy their ever-increasing thirst for radioactivity. Of course, I, for one, welcome our new bacterial overloards...
Not only do these bacteria use radiation as their primary source of energy, the byproducts they generate sustain other organisms as well. An entire radioactive ecosystem hidden underground... Fascinating. I wonder if there's stuff like this at the bottom of the ocean, too. You know, like those radioactive snails from a while back, only... useful.
The headline implies that these are the first organisms to survive in an ecosystem without the effects of sunlight. But there are other ecosystems devoid of (direct) sunlight influence, in the bottom of the oceans ecosystems are supported by the heat and nutrients of volcanic vents and more recently life has been found deep in caves streams so sulphur rich they would be fatal to all other lifeforms.
AFAIK this is the third such non-solar dependant ecosystem.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
So now we have completely different lifeforms available does that mean we have to go and kill them?
:P )? What wine goes with it? Can an entire industry, such as the bass boat industry, be built around it? Will killing one in some way enrage members of PETA? Does it want to kill us? Do spotted owls eat them? Are their implications for cosmetic products that reduce wrinkles? So many factors.
That depends on further testing. Does it go well on a pizza? Can you stuff it with crab meat (or crabpeople
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Because the Great Omnipotent Deity in the sky made it that way!
How bout this... The bacteria splits water into Hydrogen and relies on Uranium. So why not use colonies of this stuff to eat radioactive waste and produce the Hydrogen we need to manufacture Hydrogen fuel... Am I stating the obvious? Does anyone know if this is being done? If not feel free to email me my Nobel peace prize (:
"More than 4,000 coal miners have died in accidents in Ukraine since 1991." Radio Free Europe
Thats Ukraine alone. Worldwide? In China? God knows.
Now for Chernobyl:
"Total eventual deaths due to radiation could reach 4,000, including those of evacuees, a statistical prediction based on estimated doses they received. But, "as about a quarter of people die from spontaneous cancer not caused by Chernobyl radiation, the radiation-induced increase of only about 3 per cent will be difficult to observe". Times of London
Since Chernobyl was by far the worst that death count is close to the number of people killed ever in Nuclear accidents (There were some secret problems in the USSR but no one knows.). Throw in the cancers caused by radiation from soft coal combustion and nukes win hands down as a safe alternative. Okay, the pollution is dirty but it is point source and manageable, whereas CO2 is dispersed and systemic and no one knows how dangerous.
Very frustrating to see how fear of nuclear weapons (a legitimate concern) spilled over into irrational fear of nuclear power.
Nevertheless economic and political forces conspire to prevent the nuclear industry from making a comeback. I think a major political PR initiative is need. Homer Simpson your country calls.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
The organisms are chemoautotrophs. Similar organisms have been recognized in various environments for quiet some time. Chemoautotrophs that use sulfur as a final electron acceptor have been known for quite some time. These are notable mainly for their location, which isn't particularly rich in accessible carbon.
These bacteria are enriching uranium in a clear violation of the nuclear proliferation treaty! (At least, the way we interpret it) They say they are just using it for energy production, but we know they really are doing it to make a bomb! Quick, send some carriers there and let's bomb them into stone age before these dangerous terrorists destroy us all!
If these guys go steampunk and start living in sphinxes, try your best to ignore the air-raid sirens they ring. Trust me on this.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Some of this bacteria got into my hydrogen fueled car. It won't run anymore.
Actually, that's not entirely correct. No star we know produces elements heavier than iron and nickel, which aren't very radioactive. In fact, they're the most stable nuclei we know.
The thing is, anything lower than iron and nickel tends to release energy when fused into something heavier. Anything heavier than that needs to absorb energy to fuse into something even heavier, and conversely releases some energy when split.
So eventually the reaction stops at iron and nickel. Given intense photon bombardment in the star, most nickel actually disintegrates right back into smaller nuclei, not fuse further into heavier stuff. Iron pretty doesn't do anything whatsoever, and just stays iron.
The thing there is that as you move upwards, the energy and temperature requirements tend to be insane. For example for the next step up from fusing hydrogen into helium, it takes a red giant and temperatures of about 100 _million_ Kelvin to even fuse helium into carbon before blowing itself up.
And most stars either (A) stop short of even that and become a red dwarf, or (B) blow themselves up within seconds when they start fusing helium, because that's a very unstable reaction, whose rate increases with temperature, and temperature increases with fusion rate.
But at any rate, even if you had a star massive enough, you wouldn't get many nuclei past iron, or you wouldn't get them out of the star. By the moment a star got massive and hot enough to start fusing iron into something heavier, it would just rapidly lose heat in that reaction. It just can't explode that way, so at most you'd get a black hole in the end of it all.
So since you mention stars exploding... well, that's actually where the heavier elements come from. Supernovae don't just spread those heavier metals, they _create_ them. The iron, carbon, helium and whatever else was created will be smashed with tremendous amounts of energy and at insane temperatures, and a lot of it will fuse into heavier stuff. And since the star is already blowing up, they'll get spread all over the place.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let me get this straight, these micro-organisms require radiation to live?
All this time it has been radiation is a bad thing and now all of a sudden it is radiation is a good thing? Could somebody ask GWB what way I am supposed to think?
I for one welcome our new Bacteria overlords!
Do they have oil?
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
.... grendel cluster of them.
Finally, we have something to pit against Beowolf.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
s/it's/its
:(){
Bacteria have been found in deep drill holes nearly everywhere they've been *carefully* looked for. (Because they are everywhere, the collectors have to be very careful about contamination.) These may have been seperated from conventional surface sources of food for hundreds of millions of years.
that a life form that uses radioactivity is fairly stable.
news on chernobyl shows that life can adapt to radioactivity quicker and better than we thought too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
IANAScientist, but why not use our nuclear waste then, to produce hydrogen for fuel cells via these bacteria? Or did I completely read the article incorrectly? (which is more than entirely possible and likely)
All of the energy used by life ultimately derives from nuclear reactions.
Further study has confirmed that the bacterial colony is in fact a cluster of the last remaining GOP supporters at an underground rally.
But the earliest living things on earth might have been bacteria like the ones near hydrothermal vents. They're in a kingdom called Archaea and are small and simple in design.
Their chemical traces have even been found in sediments from the Isua district of west Greenland, the oldest known sediments on Earth at about 3.8 billion years old. This means that the Archaea (and life in general) appeared on Earth within one billion years of the planet's formation, and at a time when conditions were still quite inhospitable for life as we usually think of it.
[quote continues]
The atmosphere of the young Earth was rich in ammonia and methane, and was probably very hot. Such conditions, while toxic to plants and animals, can be quite cozy for archaeans. Rather than being oddball organisms evolved to survive in unusual conditions, the Archaea may represent remnants of once-thriving communities that dominated the world when it was young.
/ducktoavoidthethrowntomatoes
Which is still rather irrelevant if you use a coal motor (ok, steam turbine) to produce that electricity in the first place. No matter how efficient you make that electric motor, the efficiency of it all is still basically the product of that _and_ the turbine that produced it in the first place.
Which, I do believe, was the GP's point.
Like... nuclear power plants, for instance? Because everything else either pollutes (e.g., coal plants) or just doesn't quite scale like some people seem to think. If you think you could just run whole countries _and_ their cars off wind turbines, solar energy and hydro plants, I want to know what planet you live on.
I.e., again, you actually just make the GP's point. Either you charge that car from a nuclear plant, or you've just moved pollution somewhere else. That was the whole point. Being both anti-nuclear and anti-pollution is just an unattainable proposition, short of returning to the stone age.
Unfortunately, a large part of the reason there is nuclear energy, so again you just make the GP's point.
Another reason is that electricity consumption didn't rise that much either. Most of the manufacturing industry actually migrated _out_ of the USA, so industrial consumption actually dropped, helping somewhat offset the rises in other parts. And home consumption didn't rise that much either. And to stay "on topic" you don't yet have every Jack Redneck driving an electric pickup-truck and Jane Soccermom driving an electric SUV, either.
Heh. If anyone knew how to make a filter that stops CO2, we wouldn't be having the whole global-warming hysteria in the first place. So _how_ are you going to manage that? No, seriously, I want to know.
Rest assured that burning coal at a power plant to produce power for an electric car releases would release _exactly_ the same quantity of CO2 into the atmosphere as burning it directly in your car... if distribution, batteries and electric motors had exactly 0% losses. As it is, it actually releases _more_. Ah, but a car runs on gasoline, not on coal, so it's already getting better for the cars.
Ditto for dispersion. How are you going to keep the CO2 from dispersing into the whole atmosphere? No, really.
So, again, you just make the GP's point. Either you charge that car from a nuclear plant, or no, we don't actually know how to manage CO2 pollution from factories either.
Which is irrelevant to the problem being discussed, so I won't get into that either.
Yes, it _can_ accelerate faster, but that's irrelevant to the pollution topic. Well, not quite: accelerate faster == use more power.
Yes, it can even get some of its energy back when braking, but that's losing sight of the fact that the electric car has to carry half a ton of batteries too. So it will actually expend extra power into moving all those batteries (doubly so if you want to move them faster), which means extra pollution at some power plant down the line. Unless, of course, you use nuclear power.
Unfortunately that just boils down to "it could get better in the future" optimism. Yes, battery chemistry will probably eventually improve, but here and now it still sucks big fat hairy arse compared to gasoline. Here and now driving an electric c
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I for one welcome our new water-splitting bacterial overlords.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Wow, this is really amazing, because all the bacteria in our digestive track surely relies on sunlight for life.
Bacteria, in general, do not use photosynthesis. A few do, but very few. What bacteria use for an energy source varies quite a bit, actually. But it's certainly not strange for a bacteria to not need sunlight, since the vast majority don't.
Technically, these aren't event bacteria. They're extremophiles which means they fall in the Archae domain, not the Bacteria domain. But maybe I'm being too picky.
...all I can think about was this awful novel by Robert L. Forward called Camelot 30K. Good science, bad writing.
First, wow, not to be rude but "Is uranium naturally radioactive" is a grade 6 science fact. You might want to look into brushing up a bit on your Science 101, if only so you can be more confident of choices you make based on science (and recognizing when things aren't based on such.)
Next, there are, well really were, natural reactors. Wikipidia has a short entry on this, a great webpage on it from the US Dept. of Energy, here's also a picture from Astronomy Picture of the Day showing what it looks like in a mine today. The article that first brought this to wide attention is "A Natural Fission Reactor" by George A. Cowan in Scientific American, July 1976. (Pages 36 - 47) (apparently not available online, visit your local library to read this fascinating article for free.)
Uranium ores are found all over the planet. Australia has 40% of known Uranium ores and is the largest exporter, the US West has 7 active mines, and Canada has 3 very large mines for both domestic use and export. Uranium ores are not always deep in the ground, surface mines are common, indeed there are places, including in the US, where rocks & soil sufficiently "hot" (in terms of emitted radiation, they're generally not warm enough to discern by touch) to harm folks in long term exposure can be found laying around on the surface.
However rocks are a rare, purely local danger, radioactively contaminated water is much more common & dangerous, and also Radon gas. Indeed there are parts of the US, for example Massachusetts, where radon gas detectors are routinely recommended for residential basements.
Finally, the University of Manchester has been doing research* on using bacteria to bioremediate radioactive materials, in short to use biological processes to convert dangerous radioactive compounds into less dangerous (but still radioactive) ones. These biochemical processes can't convert elements, no lead-to-gold, but they can "lock up" materials into less chemically active, or insoluble, forms. Doubtless discovery of bacteria already evolved to take advantage of highly radioactive environments will be of great advantage to their research.
* This is to an archived version of the University of Manchester website, the current website doesn't seem to have as widely informative a page.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
This also suggests that life is probably fairly common throughout the universe. It clearly does not depend on the conditions on the surface of our planet. Might want to modify a couple of terms in the Drake equation.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
In related news. . .
The US has added South African bacteria to the Axis of Evil.
Ah, way to start a good old fallacy. You can't actually make your point without attacking the other's supposed motives, can you? Well, anyway, let's ignore that and have a look, shall we?
"Ignoring friction" is good and fine in an ideal world, but in the RL it isn't. Heck, why stop at friction? Let's ignore all resistance for that matter, and then you don't even need an engine to keep going.
Heh. Nope. Funny, but just nope. An electric motor provides pretty much constant torque at any RPM, and regardless of how that RPM varies. Pretty much the torque (hence acceleration) limit for a given motor is how much current you can run through it. If anything, running more current through it just means more losses, so you're really saving nothing by flooring the "gas pedal" instead of starting slowly. Au contraire.
Ah, again ignoring RL. _If_ you had a perfect system, where nothing is lost, the world would be such a wonderful place indeed. Unfortunately RL doesn't quite work that way.
Plus, you'd save exactly as much there with a hybrid car using an ultra-capacitor, so it's hardly anything specific to going all electric.
Heh. How about giving me some numbers, then? That big ol' combustion engine _and_ the fuel tank still weighs a fraction of what the batteries would weigh. Let me do some maths for you:
Gasoline stores some 14kWH/kg. About a quarter of it is actually useful, and about 75% are losses of the that big ol' combustion engine. So if you filled your tank with, say, 20 kilos worth of gasoline (about 25 litres, or about 8 gallons), you'd have about 280 kWH stored there, out of which some 70 actually help move your car.
For the best Li ion batteries available nowadays, the density is 120 WH/kg, or 0.120 kWH/kg. (For lead-acid it's 0.04 kWH/kg. For ultra-capacitors it's 0.003 to 0.005.)
Let's also assume that you have an ideal system where the electrical car is 100% efficient. It isn't, but let's pretend for a bit, shall we? So for this ideal car we'd need to store only 70 kWH to be equivalent to the above quantity of gasoline. Right?
So you'd need 70 / 0.12 = 583 kilos worth of batteries. I don't know what car you drive, but most internal combustion engines are lighter than that.
To put things into perspective, for an Audi A8 4.2 TDI Quattro the engine weighs 255 kg. And here we're talking a big freakin' 4.2 litre 8-cylinder dual-turbo Diesel engine. The 4.2 litre 8-cylinder gasoline version weighs in at 190 kg. The BMW M54 engine, a big ol' 3.0 litre 6-cylinder engine, weighs 170 kg. A Ferrarri F50's engine weighs 198 kg, and that's a big ol' V12. But these are powerful sports engines. Your average small commuter car will have a much smaller engine.
But so far we've been making the comparison based on the flawed assumption that the electric engine weighs n
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bad title, I do realize. It should be "Strange Bacteria Sustains Itself Without Dependence on Photosynthetic-based Food Chain"
all the bacteria in our digestive track surely relies on sunlight for life (tounge-in-cheek)
It isn't that everything else, including the bacteria in your gut, relies directly on sunlight for photosynthesis that it performs iteself, but rather that the entire food chain depends on photosynthesis as the underlying energy-fixating process.
The bacteria in your GI tract rely on the food you eat, which is either plants (photosynthetic autotrophs) or animals (heterotrophs feeding on photosynthetic autotrophs).
Every part of life that you are used to ultimately depends on photosythesis as the source for the energy in the food chain.
Exceptions are rare, which is why this is interesting. Chemosynthetic organisms (such as archaea and other extremophiles), are found near deep sea hydrothermal vents, using geothermal heat as the source energy. These South African bacetria are a second type of chemosythetic ecosystem.
It appears that these newly discovered bacteria in South Africa are chemotrophs using hydrogen and sulfates, with radiation being the underlying energy source, with no underlying food-chain-based dependency on photsynthesis.
You don't split water into hydrogen gas. You split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas.
The nuclear industry could have used this information after the 3 Mile Island Fiasco.
I can see the tv commercials now: "Some call it a nuclear disaster. We call it life".
Unless I'm literally transparent, this also applies to the strange (won't argue with that) bacteria infesting my intestine. I did RTFA, but mostly because I found the ./ headline confusing.
Man, I feel sorry for the poor bastards who work in those conditions.
The bacteria must also be a Slashdot reader!
Folks, if you want to argue physics, go read a physics book first. Wishful thinking and appeal-to-hidden-motives phalacies are _not_ how science works. Show me some real physics data, not rants about GM and Exxon conspiracies, not copious hand-waving, and not verbal fallacies. Those do not quite a scientific proof make. I don't freakin' care what GM or Exxon think. Try reading at least a high-school physics book and using your own head for a change.
Again, let me enlighten you: an electric motor is made of coils through which current passes. Big thick coils consisting of layers upon layers upon layers of wire, like big spools of thread, on a ferrite core. That creates the magnetic field that creates the torque. (Actually, lemme play it safe and translate "torque" for you too: it's what makes it turn.)
_That_ is the wire I'm talking about. That mile of wire in those coils. Not the battery cables.
So, yes, the battery cable doesn't mean shit. Too bad your knowledge of electric motors means just about as much too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And here I thought it would be the cockroaches.
Something similar was predicted by Charles Sheffield in "The Compleat McAndrew"
6 7157857X.htm?blurb
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/067157857X/0
I miss Mr. Sheffield. There are few true scientists who write hard science fiction.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
... because for some reason, I was thinking of extremophilic microorganisms in the shower today or the other day.
Someone mentioned that a chemical reaction from a bacterium couldn't catalyze a nuclear reaction -- true enough -- but I wonder if there is some way of having a quantum effect from a lifeform catalyze a nuclear reaction?
(Yes, I sort of like the Quantum Orchestrated Resonance theory of consciousness...)
crappy triceratops