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Bacteria Found Alive In Ice 120,000 Years Old
FiReaNGeL notes research presented this morning at Penn State on the discovery of a new, ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles. From the psu.edu announcement: "The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen, and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system. This new species is among the ubiquitous, yet mysterious, ultra-small bacteria, which are so tiny that they are able to pass through microbiological filters. Called Chryseobacterium greenlandensis, the species is related genetically to certain bacteria found in fish, marine mud, and the roots of some plants."
Have another reason to point and laugh.
"This is a great discovery. There is nothing at all to worry about." said the oddly-behaving scientist who discovered the sled dog.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But..... the earth is only 6000 years old.
Somebody is lying!
What power has law where only money rules.
Break out the antibiotics!
Sure, the bacteria survived. But how do you think it felt, being trapped in ice for 120,000 years? The first few years were probably ok. After that, it probably got really good at checkers. After the 1000th year, it proved that P=NP. At year 10,000, it dreamed of starting its own civilization. But then it started to go mad. Mad. MAD, I tell you. Now that it is free, the bacteria wants nothing but to seek revenge upon all other life forms for continuing to prosper and evolve while it was trapped beneath the ice. Buried alive. Buried alive...
(Kaaaaahn....)
Hell, I've got bacteria in my refrigerator that's as old as that.
This ain't rocket surgery.
I for one welcome our ice trapped super small bacteria overlords!!!
I would hate to discover that this was a rare bacteria that produces greenhouse gasses... and will begin to reproduce rapidly now that it's free.
Anything you say will be held against you.
The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen, and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system.
Sounds like my cubicle at work.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Do we ...
(Achoo!)
*sniff*
... have any immunity?
Has anyone made sure the melting cup was clean?
If you put the bacteria into a radioactive, poisonous desert with a rat, a cockroach, Cher and a lawyer, which would survive longest, and would it actually eat the others?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
With the (hopefully) similar conditions on Mars, this discovery gives hope that Phoenix can find life in that type of environment.
I am sure after all these years, this bacteria is either:
A) Eager to evolve into an organism capable of having sex.
B) Eager to start posting regularly on Slashdot.
Yes, these options are mutually exclusive.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Okay. Here is what I propose in order to save "life [kind of] as we know it", before WE destroy it here first.
Lets cultivate this little bug, put in on a nice british-silver-martini ice container, and start sprouting it throughout the solar system and beyond.
By the time they reach Alpha Centauri, we probably will have nuked each other asses and made this rock too hot for anything living.
This way, at least, we know we let some of our "evolutive" life er... "style", out there in the universe for the Flying Spaghetti Monster to save it and put it in a nicer planet where it will evolve into er... something with a DNA.
NO SIG
1) Granted the bacteria student status
2) Gave them all accounts on PSUVM
3) turned them loose on the internet
I can just see it now...
Breaking news:
Scientists have genetically engineered flesh-eating bacteria that is too small for scientists to detect. Drinking from your faucet is in advised as no filter can filter them out. Symptoms include explosive diarrhea then your eyeballs will fall out.
Bender: "I was enjoying it until you guys showed up!"
He wants his ice-cream back
Eurika!!
Now we can seed Mars! Soon it'll be all green. Suddenly the green will dissappear, prompting a team of astronauts to voyage there to discover, the hard way, that bugs ate the green bacteria!
I for one welcome our new Bacteria Overlords...
To pass through a microbiological filter, how did they find it? The article states how they study the bacteria, but how did they know to process this one specific piece of ice for ancient bacteria? Were they just going through thousands of tons of ancient ice core and happened upon it by accident?
Meet new people, and kill them.
How do they know ? Did they ask it when it's birthday was ? Cut one in half and count the rings ??
Same exact text, but with a picture, from physorg.
http://www.physorg.com/news131712233.html
I've discovered that bacteria grows faster now in California in frozen water than in room temperature water... is this the cause??
Honest question here: Can somebody with knowledge about this give me some data on the ice formation timeline here? I remember reading that a P-51 Mustang was dug out of the ice in Greenland and it was under 268 feet of ice after 50 years in 1992. That nets out to 5.36 feet of ice accumulation per year. Two miles of ice is roughly 10500 feet, or 1970 years. What am I missing? Non-linear accumulation?
the team realized they were just studying a hair sample from Joe Paterno.
- "Mankind evolved from apes"
- "Dinosaurs evolved into birds"
- "We would need a material stronger than steel for a space elevator"
- "Dinosaurs could be reconstructed from their DNA"
- "Life might exist on Mars"
Now, I'm probably just receiving the news out of order, but the "X might be true - Voila X!" scenario seems to happen an aweful lot lately. Next I'll be hearing about bacteria that eat CO2, leave diamonds as waste, and are sweet to boot.Lucy is found.
Feathered dinosaur fossils found.
Carbon nanotubes discovered.
Soft tissue found in dino thigh bones.
Bacteria thrive in Mars-like environment on Earth.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You get considerable compression with that depth. I think the most relevant part is that air should be completely pushed out at that depth. Ice accumulation also differs by location and time. Maybe the P-51 came down right before a bunch of good decades? Finally, there's the matter of ice flow. Ice under that sort of pressure behaves like a slow liquid. It's flowing downhill slowly. So I suppose it's possible that the ice simply can't accumulate beyond a certain height because it flows out as fast as it accumulates.
When I first read the headline I was hoping it was the a "life on Mars" discovery from the Phoenix...article doesn't deliver...
Though I do wonder if this has implications for the Mars mission?
Bah, send this bacteria to Mars, and see if it survives. Maybe it will give some Martian pilots the flu, before they get into their war machines to punish us for violating their soil.
the bacteria "knew" the ice was gonna start melting some day?
if it didn't then what's the purpose of staying "alive" for 120000 years?
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
How will this discovery save our bananas?
We need them to defeat invading aliens!
It was on the other night. There were many similarities between the remake and the movie. The plot was essentially the same: A Scoop satellite deorbits, crash lands in a small town where only a baby and an old sterno guzzling man survive. A bunch of scientists are gathered into a facility called WildFire to analyze the space originating organism. One of the scientists is an epileptic. WildFire has a nuclear self destruct, which has to be disarmed because the Andromeda Strain feeds on radiation. Yada, yada, yada...
A few differences: The Andromeda strain was a sulpher based life form that used crystals to communicate between various parts of itself. Thus it was able to transmit data concerning WildFire's various attempts to destroy it to other samples of itself, both inside and outside WildFire. The strain was found inside a carbon nanostructure. Since we lacked the technology to create such structures, the strain must have come from an extra-terrestrial source.
At least, that was the assumption until they took a look at the carbon nanostructure itself. There were two types of non-carbon atoms bound into the nanostructure. Someone thought that perhaps they encoded a binary message. When the message was decrypted, part of it turned out to be an ASCII message, the name of a particular sulfer eating bacteria that lived near the volcanic vents in the deep ocean. The other part is a graphic of a logo. Because the message was ASCII, and the tech was beyond us, the conclusion was that the Andromeda Strain had slipped through a wormhole from the future. The wormhole was what caused the Scoop satellite to de-orbit.
WildFire gets a sample of the bacteria, and find that it eats the Andromeda strain like it's going out of style. To prevent the strain from communicating this, all samples are destroyed. Except one. One of the WildFire team is pressured into keeping a sample. It is later shown being loaded into one of many small vaults on board a module of the ISS. The module is emblazoned with the logo that was found encoded in the carbon nanostructure.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I imagine that something like this could be very useful in terraforming...
Maybe we should introduce this bacteria to the Previously uncontacted Amazon Tribe.
after all, it's been around likely over 120,000 years. I work at a science research institution in DC where several people have been researching e coli at high pressure and standard atp. Yes, Virginia, there is life at 5 GPa. And beyond. I'm amazed how these microbe survive for years at depths and pressures far below what many people think of as a high pressure regime. It almost makes all the Lost City studies rather silly when researchers make claims about life at the bottom of a 7 mile deep trench.
Clearly the bacteria was waiting for the Nintendo Wii, but overshot the release date a little..
. . . only to die of gobal warming . . .
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. - Thorstein
Is that band saw sterile?
ONOZ! not yet another futile evolution vs. creationism take no prisoners flame war.
Take a look at this NOVA documentary on the recent Dover, Pennsylvania court battle over teaching evolution in school. It is an incredibly view into the tactic of the creationist movement.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html
Saying you have "faith in the scientific method" is an oxymoron. That's like saying I have faith that the Earth's circumference is 24,901.55 miles. Here, read up on the scientific method: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Scientific_Method
The cavemen buried those bacteria for a reason! You have no idea what you've unleashed!
So... they extracted bacteria from ancient ice that can't be filtered? Wasn't this the premise of a horror movie?
An article about science and under it 150 comments,2 of which contain good jokes, 89 containing lame jokes, 40 comments on irrelevant topics and 20 criticizing my addition skills. Not one word about the article.
And yeah, I'm an AC, so what?
I wanted to throw out that in order to advance science, you must trust that the people before you were rigorous, thorough, and any number of synonyms enough that their work is solid to stand upon. Insert quote: That guy... great because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. You know who I'm talking about. That's a bit of faith, and if you find some work to be a sham, or lack an insight that was not possible in the past, then you have to go back to the drawing board.
A whopping 120 characters to take your mind off topic. Tested in MS Word.
They could have at least had the decency to die and become oil. I'm tired of filling my HumVee for $200.
WE ARE...
Some virulent virus/bacteria that's been trapped in the ice for hundreds or millions of years...
And if we do, I hope we fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here.
If this bacteria can pass through microbiological filters, wtf is keeping it in the lab?
wtf is keeping it from eating our flesh?
They're using their grammar skills there.
..I've known managers who have clung to their positions even after the company shut down!
You should take some logic courses. Which is why the burden of proof is NOT on "proving there is no God", but rather on "proving there is a God". Since the second is also a shaky proposition (up to now the number of evidence which stand even a slight scrutinies is equal to zero), ANY God's existence (Christian or not) stand to be forever on the SAME level as the existence of gnome, leprechauns, dragon, santa and unicorns. The difference is the number of people believing in all those things without having any evidences whatsoever, and that last point is neither a point for or against a more probable existence of any gods. Contrary to what many people believe, the probability existence of a gods is not linked to the amount of believer it was worshiped by. Actually it was the-goddess-mother (the one worshiped 20K-30K or more years ago) the only goddess of creation, and since then we are all screwed because we switched from matriarchal to patriarchal gods, and she don't like that one a bit.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I, for one...
oh, never mind.
jesus christ, jesus christ..suck on my chocolate, salty balls!
After more then 120000 years, the flesh eating bacteria awakens....
Somebody send Kurt Russell over there quick!
The phrase 'the DM is a fucking retard' uttered by any of the PC's usually stops the world.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
that's nothing compared to The Elder Ones.
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
You have to have faith in the scientific method. If there is one thing annoy me in rabid atheists is that they usually consider themselves above religious people for lacking faith, when at times they are even more fanatical then some religious zealots.
If you use the scientific method, you believe that the world is logic, and most of the time, deterministic in an Cartesian way. You believe in cause and effect. Most of the time, you believe in energy conservation and isotropy (and temporal isotropy) of the fundamental laws, even if you don't realize that. You obviously believe in independence between the observer and observed subject (which we know not be true, at a quantum level, incidentally).
And these people dare to say they do not have faith. Yes they do. Being slashdot, with a large percentage of atheists, mod me down as you see fit. This proves some atheists are no better and no less fanatical than the worst scientologist. They just choose another religion to be a zealot of.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
While this hasn't been widely accepted, largely due to concern over contamination in the laboratory, it is a serious claim. Indeed, one of the critics of Vreeland's 250 million-year claim is also a worker on this ice core material (see Science v317 p0111 (2007) "Ancient Biomolecules from Deep Ice Cores Reveal a Forested Southern Greenland").
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Religion is the best mass destruction weapon ever!
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
They've bassically found bacteria where ever they've drilled deep. The stuff in oil deposits is obvious - that a source of buriend biomaterial transformation into oil and energy for the bacteria. Less obvious are bacteria found in igneous basement, perhaps from ground water over millions or billions of years.
"The first ten million years were the worst, and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline." - Marvin
How did they determine that 2 miles of ice equals 120,000 years?
This article seems free from the "haha at evolution" stuff you get on other sites about the lost squadron: http://www.b-29s-over-korea.com/lost_squadron/lost_squadron.html
250 feet in 40 years suggests a "sink rate" of 6.25 feet/year.
There are 10560 feet in 2 miles.
10560/6.25=1689.6 years.
Compression of the lower layers would obviously skew the results, but as far as 120,000 years?
now what I wanna know is how they radiocarbon dated it without killing the bugger. Or did they just "assume" its 120,000 years old? I mean this could just be another Coelacanth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth incident. Oh sure it's just one now and it's a big event, but give it 30 years and we'll find that there's a modern population growing specifically under the lid of jam jars.
"That's no moon"
is probably something the researchers didn't say when looking at these samples for the first time.
In another universe God set up, froodling is a deadly sin. In this universe, it is impossible to froodle. In both universes, free will exists. If you accept the possibility of this premise, then you must accept the possibility that God could have set up a universe where free exists, but sin is impossible.
Just be thankful we don't live in the universe where every possible action is a sin.
As to your point about free will and proof, I simply don't understand how you can say that proof and free will are mutually exclusive. Are you saying that proof in mathematics doesn't exist, or that free will doesn't?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
He may not get to decide for others what they believe, but there is nothing wrong with trying to get others to believe any particular thing, which is exactly what you are doing. He can call anything he likes 'picking and choosing,' and everyone is free to accept or reject that definition.
I'm sick and tired of people trying to place limits on free speech. If he isn't free to criticize what he sees as stupidity, what gives you the right to criticize him, you hypocrite?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
is it niave to ask if melting polar caps - will reintroduce all sorts of ancient bacteria into the global bacteriosphere?