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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.
if it didn't then what's the purpose of staying "alive" for 120000 years? Evolution is not teleological (which means "purposive" or "goal-oriented"). This bacterium happened to be able to survive long periods in the freezing cold due to some mutation or another. This would be a big evolutionary advantage because it could then live and reproduce in areas where most other things cannot.
Some of these bacteria got frozen for 120,000 years. They weren't waiting for it to thaw out; they're just out there living in the cold regions where nothing else can live, and sticking it out even when it gets too cold for them.
Analogously, imagine that there is some primitive tribe of humans with no knowledge of climatology, currently living in tropical or desert climes who, unbeknown to anyone, have a mutation which allows them to survive in hibernation in freezing cold temperatures, and then reawaken when it warms up again. They did not evolve this because they needed to survive freezing cold temperatures, they just have a genetic adaptation which is not disadvantageous, and might even correlate with some other adaptation which is advantageous. And because they live in warm climes, nobody knows they have this mutation.
Then say someday we enter another great ice age, so cold that everybody on Earth dies out, except this tribe, who barely manages to live on for thousands of years, frozen in the ice, due to their mutation. And then eventually the ice age ends and the world gets nice and warm, these people thaw out and start living their lives again.
Now imagine we're aliens watching this future Earth thaw out. We might ask, did these people know that an ice age was coming? No... they've probably never even heard of ice. So they certainly didn't know that the ice age they never expected was going to end eventually. So what's the purpose of them having this mutation that allowed them to stay "alive" frozen in the ice for thousands of years? The answer is that there was none; they didn't mean to have the mutation, and nobody meant for them to have the mutation, they just had it by chance, and as chance would have it it came in really handy when the whole world froze over and everybody but them died out, which is why they're still around for us to wonder about.
Or in short: They didn't get the mutation so that they could survive. They survived because they had the mutation.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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?
1) Spread your genetic material
2) Don't die. Someone is watching too much porn. I think you have those in the wrong order. I am alive and have no interest in either of those goals. But especially not #1. In fact just the opposite. I would much rather die than spread any of my genetic material.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
These two cuts will generate significant waste rock or ice. If I were doing this, with normal 1m-long core sections, I'd clean off the saw and table after each section (giving ice shavings in 1m-long bags), then melt each bag separately and "plate" each bag separately. "Plating" is the taking of an innoculum at (various) dilutions into (various different nutrients) petri dishes and/ or culture bottles and incubating. You'd also check the "blank" regularly - plating your dilution saline, etc. It sounds like they plated both the raw melted ice AND melted ice that had been put through a microbial filter and got the same results from both.
Obviously their experimental protocol had been designed to include microbiological sampling, so one can assume that clean-room techniques were in operation further up the material-handling pipeline.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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