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Microbe Mat the Size of Greece Discovered In the Sea
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A mat of microbes the size of Greece has been discovered on the sea floor off the Pacific coast of South America. 'These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet... A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms...'"
At the bottom of the ocean is a good metaphor for Greece's economy right now!
It's not a bug, it's a fixture!
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Please carry on with your regularly scheduled consumption.
Hmmm???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
can I eat it?
Liar. Your user name implies you may be the avatar of this very consciousness!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
does this mean we will need to bail them out as well?
has anyone seen a map of Greece with all it's crazy islands and jagged coasts? How can you compare the size of anything to that country
Next time, compare vs something with a somewhat reasonable shape.
like Saskatchewan damnit!
Alpha Centauri was such a nice game ...
More importantly there are plenty of unexplored function libraries in the 1 billion marine microbial species waiting to activate.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
It's the lost city of Atlantis!
... and then they built the supercollider.
Ooooh sick burn dude! /I'm Greek :P
Was? It still is! I Transcended earlier this morning, as a matter of fact.
Now we know the REAL source of this "mat"... ok, who was it?
i would agree, the quotes alone are golden. And it didnt have the "RTS" like special resources that showed up in the later civ games.
i wonder tho, how many actually use the vehicle design system?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Was there any doubt that microbes own our planet and merely tolerate us? (heck, more bacterial DNA in your body than human one...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Considering that is related to (the size of) Greece and that it could grow more, maybe in the future could be called Gaia?
Just goes to show what can happen when you give something 4-5 billion years to debug.
Thank god you said average, because I thought you were talking about me and I was about to start a flamewar.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
Now I know I didn't read TFA, but how does the RIAA/MPAA fit into this story? Are they suing the microbes for copyright infringement as well?? Heartless bastards.
... a fungus among us.
Have gnu, will travel.
...welcome our new plankton overlords!
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
While the requiring of specific resources to build certain things is new, they (to some extent) have been there since at least civ 2 in the form of bonuses for production.
What's this? A science story from NewYorkCountyLawyer?.....
Actually there is a bit of evidence, not publicly available, which would support your theory that I may have been a little bit out of my element with this story:
This was the first of my 232 stories that was actually improved by the Slashdot editor.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
there is quite a difference between a general bonus to production, and having to hunt out specific kinds of resources to get anywhere. Still, i guess its more accurate, in that it forces trade and military activity rather then just find a corner of the map and wall up.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
i would agree, the quotes alone are golden. :)
No doubt about that
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Interesting. Such giant microbial mats used to be the dominant biological communities in the Precambrian, often forming structures called stromatolites, but most of them were believed to have met their demise during the Cambrian, when lots of new large multicellular critters could literally munch or burrow their way through them. Stromatolites are still present today in a few places, generally in environments too harsh for multicellular organisms to live in, like Shark Bay in Western Australia. But this discovery would indicate that large microbial mat communities proved more evolutionarily durable than previously thought.
This is a bit of an odd submission from NewYorkCountryLawyer. Is the microbial mat a client? What sort of music is it accused of filesharing? That might give us some insight into its nature.
It would be really cool if it was the Leviathan. I'd like to see it go after the RIAA labels, towering over terrified Sony execs as they ran for their lives.
Loose lips lose spit.
I bet the result would not be very fun...
A long term gradient from this to the oxygen free microbes we've recently heard about and you've got a life cycle that creates oil. Now if that's the case we should capture some samples, diddle some DNA to accellerate the process and create an algae sequence that takes garbage and produces gasoline - or experiences runaway growth and turns the entire planet into green slime.
Hm... the plot's going to need some work but for a rough sketch that will do for a start.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Who thought it read Microsoft map the size of greece
Only you...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You probably picked this article to submit because of your daily dealings with other types of slime molds.
I don't recall that he addressed how the inscrutable sentient ocean actually came to be.
In any case, Solaris gets my vote as one of the three greatest science fiction novels ever.
I don't make any claims to know about average Greek intelligence, but I'd imagine having Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Hippocrates, Socrates, Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, etc., etc., in the sample would give them a pretty good head start.
My god those are big microbes. (Pity the title seems to take an alternative view on the issue)
It is what it is.
Yang is building a planetbuster, we much achieve transcendence with planet before its too late! Move a foil ship to that microbe hex stat!
everybody run for cover
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
will it blend?
without pics.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I believe you meant to say, "Yes, their is."
My pics.
I find it strange that original article in SA does not present any pictures (or any other methodological reference for that matter) of the glorified "mat".
That's it?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
So, what insights into RIAA behavior can we gain by studying these microbes? I'd say they are lower than whale shit, but they appear to be at exactly the same depth as whale shit... (and those microbes are pretty low too!)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Socrates wasn't so smart... in fact, I have it on good authority that his last words were, "I drank what?!?"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Quick, cover it with sediment, wait a few million years, and voila... more oil!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Hasn't that been the general biological consensus recently?
Archaeo-lifeforms, being far less specialized seem to be able to both spread widely and cope with marginal or rapidly-changing conditions. Witness jellyfish, etc. When a biome's conditions are very stable over a long period of time, specialist organisms develop that are more efficient (at everything, really) and quickly outcompete the generalist, simpler older forms. As long as the older forms aren't completely extinguished (which logically I'd have to say is relatively unlikely, given their ability to occupy LOTS of niches simultaneously), when the environment again starts changing more rapidly, the specialist forms start to fail and the older generalists come again to the fore.
My guess would be that the location of this mat is otherwise fairly UNfriendly for more-developed forms, leaving it to happily churn away these millions of years without something discovering that it's tasty and nutritious (at least, not enough predators to outpace its reproductive rate).
-Styopa
How do they breathe and receive food? even the cells of our bodies need circulated blood in vessels to receive oxygen and food. How would they do it if the weren't attached with vessels in between?
Wasn't this the star of a 1958 movie? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
Looks like it's working on a remake http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1501672/
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
There's a Flinx story about it. It was called the VOM.
It wasn't a good neighbor.
--- Mercutio was right.