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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
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.
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"... 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.
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?
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It may not be totally green...
OK, before someone else says it, it's not green at all because living without sunlight it has no chlorophyll!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Maybe it's Cobalt green with radioactive Cobalt-60. :-P
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(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."
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.
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.
"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?
Of course they cannot. Bacteria (and life in general) work only in the domain of electromagnetic and gravitational forces. They cannot influence the rate of decay of any nucleus in any way.
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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....
You apparently do not know the difference between a nuclear detonation and a nuclear meltdown.
What you describe is a nuclear detonation, whis is physically impossible to be produced by a nuclear power plant.
A meltdown is a different beast, where it is not the meltdown itsself that causes the damage, but the resulting mechanical failures from the sudden release of heat. Incidentally, at least in US designed reactors, this has been taken into account and is why we have containment domes over the reactors. This is why Three Mile Island was a non-event and Chernobyl was a big one, had Chernobyl had a dome, it would have released considerably less radiation.
You say you want a revolution....
capable of instantly eradicating all life within an 10 km radius,
o wer.shtml/ colmain.html
Do you have a source for that figure?
all of the examples you gave above are cleanable to an extent.
You do realise that coal-fired plants release radioactive waste into the atmosphere during normal operation, right?
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/adaptation/nuclear_p
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text
http://www.epa.gov/radtown/coal-plant.htm
But feel free to google it for more; they're just the top few results for a search for "coal power station radioactivity".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Chernobyl was a big one
t m
yep, and to add to your point, chernobyl did not kill everything within a 10km radius, nor is it "uncleanable" - in fact nature has done so well at cleaning it up / living with it since (most of) the humans left, that people are talking about making it a nature reserve: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4923342.s
"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
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.
Do they have oil?
.... 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.
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.
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.
I for one welcome our new water-splitting bacterial overlords.
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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.
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.
It is quite possible to be sufficiently knowledgeable about either biology or physics to state that no bacteria can "catalyze" a nuclear reaction. This isn't cutting edge physics or complex biology; fission reactions aren't catalyzed by chemical ones. At all. That doesn't leave enough wiggle room for you to be right.
I could maybe, possibly, see bacteria concentrating fissile material. That would speed up the rate of fission, increasing both decay and radioactivity. Wouldn't work with all forms of radioactive decay though - not everything radioactive is fissile. And you'd be trading 1X years of 1Y radiation for 1/2X years of 2Y radiation; you'd just turn long lived low hazard waste into short lived high hazard waste.
But catalyze a nuclear reaction with a chemical one? Not a chance in hell. You can't change a compound's nuclear properties by chemical proccesses. Unless you want to give medival alchemy a shot, you are SOL.
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