Russians Find "New Bacteria" In Lake Vostok

tverbeek writes "Russian scientists believe they have found a new type of bacteria in the sub-glacial Lake Vostok. From the article: 'The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," he said. "We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he added.'"

Comments

SCIENCE!

[Rinikusu]

FUCK YES!

Re:SCIENCE!

[thestudio_bob]

HOW DOES IT WORK?!?

Re:SCIENCE!

[Sponge Bath]

It's poetry in motion
She turned her tender eyes to me
As deep as any ocean
As sweet as any harmony

Re:SCIENCE!

[JustOK]

Burma shave.

Re:SCIENCE!

[noh8rz10]

We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he added.'"

shittiest name ever!

Re:SCIENCE!

[Roman Coder]

We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he added.'"

shittiest name ever!

Could be worse. Could be 'Odo'.

Re:SCIENCE!

[ColdWetDog]

Just dress it up in Latin -

Inexploratus incognitus

Sounds much more erudite.

Re:SCIENCE!

[Black Parrot]

FUCK YES!

HOW DOES IT WORK?!?

I think he told you in his post.

Re:SCIENCE!

[Guignol]

No, the unclassified and unidentified life form has been called "he added".
So it should become something like 'additionem dixit'

Re:SCIENCE!

[macson_g]

Caps lock? Press it again to turn it off.

uh-oh.

[new death barbie]

this is bad, I just know it.

Re:uh-oh.

[Wrexs0ul]

It's fine, they're not Norwegian

Re:uh-oh.

[Man On Pink Corner]

I didn't get nervous until I re-read the summary and noticed that the Russians seem to have categorized their genetics research program under Nuclear Physics.

Re:uh-oh.

[spazdor]

In other news, Madagascar has shut down all ports.

Re:uh-oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eww don't like to that fucking dog shit remake they pooped out recently....

Re:uh-oh.

[Jarik C-Bol]

not a remake, a prequel. (whose timeline ends literally 5 seconds before the start of the original).

Re:uh-oh.

[ldobehardcore]

More like Nuclear Chemistry if you ask me. Where else is the Chromosomal DNA found?

Re:uh-oh.

[rve]

More like Nuclear Chemistry if you ask me. Where else is the Chromosomal DNA found?

Thank God I, Mr. Pedantic, got here just in time, to ruin your joke with unsolicited facts: bacteria do not have a cell nucleus.

Re:uh-oh.

[ldobehardcore]

I said chromosomal DNA, which implies a nucleated cell, ie a eukaryote, in order to make my bad pun work.

I'm much worse than a pedant, I'm a punner, and nobody likes those.

Re:uh-oh.

[IndustrialComplex]

I'm much worse than a pedant, I'm a punner, and nobody likes those.

Its true, British stock speculators are the worst.

Re:uh-oh.

[Ledgem]

The term "chromosome" really just refers to the structure of nucleic acids and proteins. While we often associate it with nucleated cells, bacterial DNA is referred to as being in a circular chromosome. If you had referred to multiple chromosomes then the implication would have been perfect, since bacteria only have one strand of DNA (one chromosome) :)

Re:uh-oh.

[ikeman32]

Too late, I have already infected all of Madagascar and evolved the bacteria to the point that finding a cure in time to prevent discovery a cure before global annihilation, which will begin momentarily.

"life form unclassified"

[ChrisKnight]

I love living in a world where the regular headlines sound like the start of a decent sci fi adventure.

Now let's just hope this puppy doesn't get out of the lab and become a sci-fi/horror. Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Anonymous Coward]

If in two hundred years we still have the history channel then we have need for a zombie plague.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

That's hyperbole, I'm afraid. It's a bacterium, just a very distant cousin. Great for studying evolution, irrelevant to Michael Chrichton. Based on the other bacteria recovered from the borehole sample, its hobbies most likely consist of "feeding on geothermal heat" and "being adapted to an extremely stable, homogeneous environment with no predators or other forms of life," which as a general rule means it's as helpless as the Kakapo.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Anonymous Coward]

I love living in a world where the regular headlines sound like the start of a decent sci fi adventure.

Now let's just hope this puppy doesn't get out of the lab and become a sci-fi/horror. Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".

The paranoid sci-fi freak in me likes the idea. But the logical, rational part of me understands that the environment it evolved to live in is a good bit colder than the human body.
Also, if it was really that nasty, it probably would have "got out" long ago instead of only surviving in the depths of a nearly frozen lake.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[bennomatic]

I understand the rationale behind the general rule as stated, but is it totally impossible that a strain of this could survive even an extreme change in environment, adapt and thrive to such a degree that it would become a danger to the natives of that environment?

I mean, I know it's more extreme than, say, eucalyptus trees in California or rabbits in Australia, but to write off the possibility completely seems like an exaggerated response.

I was going to be more glib in my response, but your sig implies that you've got some experience with the biological sciences, so my question is sincere.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Based on circumstantial evidence (another species found nearby), the bacterium is a thermophile that depends on geothermal heat for warmth. Because of the way thermophiles evolve, it is pretty much certain that the proteins in this species are non-functional at colder temperatures; the samples collected were either dead or in a deep state of antifreeze-clogged hibernation.

It's also 700 million years (or more!) behind on immune defences, which means it's vulnerable to everything from the toxins that all plants constantly secret all the time to the macrophages in our blood. The immune game is a Red Queen scenario—either a pathogen is at the forefront of innovation, or it's susceptible to the most basic form of detection.

The only environment this could possibly intrude upon is one comparable to its own—maybe a heat vent in another frozen lake. Even if it wasn't a thermophile, it would be dead meat on the surface because of bacteriophages (viruses). To add insult to injury, as far as we know this bacterium has no competitors and is not part of a community, making it highly unlikely that it has any competition or any defences.

Gene retention is like lactose tolerance—if you don't use it, you'll lose it. For animals, this typically takes a few thousand years. For bacteria it happens much more quickly. They're very simple organisms, and they're very good at adapting, but only if they've had time to adjust to their new setting. In this case, every single one of its (probably several thousand) genes has spent millions of years being fine-tuned for the most boring environment possible. It has absolutely no hope.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

What? You mean you're not basking in the glow of a monitor in your mother's basement?

Re:"life form unclassified"

[0111 1110]

At least admit that it is a good setup for a scifi novel.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[krotkruton]

The Thing

Re:"life form unclassified"

[viperidaenz]

other hobbies include: taking over a host organisms brain stem and seeking out anything that moves and doesn't smell dead. Ability to sustain motor control after death of cells.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[meglon]

Yes, it was.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[cusco]

As far as I can tell, pretty much everything is irrelevant to Michael Chrichton.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Once upon a time, being attacked by Martians was a good setup for a science fiction novel. Times change, I'm afraid.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

If not phages then something else. Protists. Nematodes. If it's really been isolated for this long, it probably has a really slow doubling time; that may be bad enough that predation could overwhelm it.

That being said, though, evolutionary pressure is still key. Viruses are host-specific because the hosts keep changing; an older bacterium is more likely to have exploitable sugar moieties on its surface.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

It's fairly probable that the last time this species was circulating in the general biosphere, animals hadn't been invented yet. It may be older than multicellular life altogether.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Finally, someone else noticed!

Re:"life form unclassified"

[dotar]

It will be better adapted than the kakapo, since, being a flightless bird, it likes to jump off cliffs at night.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[dbIII]

That's a bit rough, homocidal albino gorillas with stone ping pong paddles and medical doctors with nuclear weapons are not irrelevant to Michael Chrichton :)

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Viruses decide what to stick to by looking for unique features on the outsides of cells. Bacteria are more or less all the same on the inside, so once it's in, it's in. Phages have their own reproductive machinery for the most part; they just need a cell to reside in. One of the unique features they can stick to are glycoproteins and glycolipids embedded in the exterior cell wall (a second phospholipid bilayer that surrounds the membrane). To be honest it's fairly likely that these evolve so quickly that no phage would be able to recognize them—i.e., the arms race has moved on—but an exceptionally nonspecific phage might still be able to exploit it, or this old species might have a stump of a more complex carbohydrate tree found on newer species (the opposite of a master key, if you will.) I'm not really a membrane buff, though, so I can't tell you much more than that.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Not if it disintegrates at atmospheric pressure!

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

That sounds like it's straight out of his autobiography.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[viperidaenz]

You mean 1,000,000,000 years ago? That's when multicellular life was prolific, after a couple of billion years being much simpler.
You do know Antarctica was part of the super-continent the dinosaurs inhabited eh? Its also only been frozen for around 25 million years too.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Yyyyeah, well... if it was only isolated from the rest of the biological tree for 25 million years, we'd only see about 0.5-1% difference in the 16S rRNA. TFA reported (what I think) is at least 14% difference, which is at least 700 million years. Either all of its relatives died off, or it's been down there at that thermal vent this whole time, only vaguely aware (in an "evolutionary pressures" kinda sense) of the ice around it.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Black Parrot]

Great for studying evolution, irrelevant to Michael Chrichton

Wow, it *is* exotic if Chrichton can't phobiize it.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Black Parrot]

Those hobbies are more exciting than mine. :-/

I grow my life forms, unclassifed, in my toilet bowl.

I have to kill them off and start over every time I have company.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Black Parrot]

I love living in a world where the regular headlines sound like the start of a decent sci fi adventure.

Now let's just hope this puppy doesn't get out of the lab and become a sci-fi/horror. Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".

The paranoid sci-fi freak in me likes the idea. But the logical, rational part of me understands that the environment it evolved to live in is a good bit colder than the human body.

Maybe it chills the human body down, and dissipates the resulting negentropy by animating it.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[rve]

I love living in a world where the regular headlines sound like the start of a decent sci fi adventure.

Now let's just hope this puppy doesn't get out of the lab and become a sci-fi/horror. Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".

Indeed. If it escapes, it might colonize every pitch dark, ice cold and almost sterile lake in the immediate area!!!

Re:"life form unclassified"

[viperidaenz]

or there are other undiscovered relatives in other thermal vents elsewhere

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>That's hyperbole, I'm afraid. It's a bacterium, just a very distant cousin.

I know. Which is still very cool. Sometimes you just want it to be something extra, extra cool; like a bacterium-like organism that got there from some ancient Martian meteorite and thrived there. Even better would be some spawn of Cthulhu that escaped the Mountains of Madness and hid beneath the ice. Me, I keep looking for a fossil bryophyte with a branching sporophyte.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[rve]

700 million years (or more!)

Uhm, where did you get that figure? 700 million years is two supercontinent cycles ago - Antarctica was slightly north of the equator then. The antarctic ice cap didn't even start to form until the end of the Eocene. According to wikipedia, lake Vostok may have been isolated for the past 15 to 25 million years.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[bcmm]

its hobbies most likely consist of "feeding on geothermal heat" and "being adapted to an extremely stable, homogeneous environment

As a stable, homogenous environment, and a source of heat, I find this worrying.

(Yes, I know that, jokes aside, it wouldn't last an hour against a modern immune system.)

Re:"life form unclassified"

[JeanCroix]

Two hundred years from now it could be on the History Channel as "Zombie Plagues from the Past".

At least that would mean that in two hundred years, the History Channel will have gone back to showing actual history again.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Very possible—in which case they either also function as time capsules from various points in history, or they're close enough to a circulating system that there's nothing interesting. I'm sure the people working on this project expected to find something that dated to the last freeze.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Archaeans and obligate parasites are as close as it gets. Archaeans are ancient and only found in bizarre environments (like acid mines, where the pH is below zero) because they were driven out by their more successful offspring, vowing one day to retake the crown and reclaim Earth for themselves. (Not really, but it sounds good.) Obligate parasites like Cryptosporidium have wildly strange genomes, spending millions of years festering in the flesh of others, finding new ways to ditch seemingly-vital functions by bolting themselves, Frankensteinishly, onto their hosts... also they're basically chest bursters writ small. Our immune system's response to all of this is to devour and melt it with macrophages (white blood cells)—and if that doesn't work, multiple macrophages combine into super-cells to consume even larger particles, before disintegrating in a kamikaze blaze of glory to protect the rest of the body. And if one of our own cells goes bad, killer T cells pump them full of holes and pour in a bunch of knives.

...basically, biology is horrific enough without invoking H. P. Lovecraft, Ridley Scott, or H. G. Wells. Evolution has a much deeper imagination than any one author could hope to possess. Some day a parasitologist will come up with a new entry in the "insect-inspired alien hive mind" science fiction horror genre, and no person on the entire planet will be able to sleep for, like, a year.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

If you scrutinize the article, Sergei Bulat is quoted as saying the organism has less than 86% "DNA similarity" to other species. Taken at face value, this means that the entire genome of the bacterium is less than 86% similar, which (a) requires isolating it first and months of work, and (b) would not be impressive at all, since Escherichia coli genomes have much higher variety.

He then goes on to say that 90% is the threshold beyond which a species is considered completely unknown. This is an appropriate figure to give when discussing the evolution of one particular gene called the 16S ribosomal RNA, which is very important to cellular function and changes very slowly. It's also a standard test to use in the analysis of bacterial communities, and one of the core tools in metagenomics, because it's very unique to species and hence an excellent fingerprint. If you need citations to back up this claim, I can give you oceans of them. This is my actual day job.

So how divergent is 100 – 86 = 14%? This article references a standard 1% every 50 million years. 14 * 50 = 700 million years. This figure is quite possibly too low in this case, since evolution has a non-linear effect on sequences—eventually mutations flip multiple times, and so large numbers of changes get masked. This rate of change can be sped to 2% every 50 million years if the environment is exceptionally rich and predator-free, like inside certain cells in insects—but that's largely because the host cell is available to a degree to provide nutrients, so proper ribosomal function isn't as important.

This doesn't mean necessarily that this species has been completely isolated the whole time, just that we haven't found any surviving links. If it previously existed in a cave system, for example, that entire community could have been wiped out when Antarctica froze, leaving behind only a stub of organisms that were sheltered by the heat (and food chain) emanating from the thermal vent. Cave ecosystems often contain numerous species that have adapted so tightly to their niche that they are unable to survive outside.

That being said, this expedition has already made crap up for publicity stunts. As this hasn't been published in any journals yet and was instead released to the press first, it's entirely possible that no such species exists. Nevertheless, the claim of 14% divergence will be interpreted by other experts as more than half a billion years.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

You're also probably too cold, if that helps any.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[viperidaenz]

I still say zombie apocalypse.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

I feel like I should tell you that doesn't require esoteric organisms.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

Nope. Acid mines are weird.

Re:"life form unclassified"

[RivenAleem]

It didn't stop X-Files writers!

Re:"life form unclassified"

[Samantha Wright]

If that sort of thing could stop low-end science fiction writers, people might not have the irrational fear of robots they do. Sensationalism in sci-fi has seriously set us back, y'know.

It might actually be really old!

[Sla$hPot]

Anyways, let us see what happens to the crew before allow them to go home

Re:in soviet russia we bacteria you

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant to say, "In Soviet Russia, bacteria finds you!"

I Am Legend!

[bobthesungeek76036]

Russian style!!!

this is unimpressive

[Anonymous Coward]

I discovered SEVERAL new species of bacteria living on the surface of Uranus!

Re:this is unimpressive

[Samantha Wright]

I'm not exactly sure if this invalidates your comment, but Uranus is not believed to have a distinct surface underneath its atmosphere. The most popular model suggests that it just gets denser and denser, culminating in a rapidly-spinning mantle-ocean of water, ammonia, and other gasses long before the actual rocky core.

Re:this is unimpressive

[cusco]

One of the best deliberate "woosh"-es I've seen.

Re:this is unimpressive

[Samantha Wright]

The worst (?) part is that I didn't get any funny moderations.

Re:this is unimpressive

[Black Parrot]

The worst (?) part is that I didn't get any funny moderations.

No, the *worst* part is that it's now "Score:5, Informative".

Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[sandytaru]

They better have had a dozen outside peer reviewers staring at this, too.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

I don't think it's published yet. TFA mentions "less than" 86% DNA "similarity", which I think was supposed to be 86% 16S RNA homology, in which case, the bacterium has been separated from the nearest known species for at least 700 million years.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[kermidge]

I don't know how this stuff works so can only stupidly speculate that it will be interesting to try to follow the mutations this wee beastie underwent to let it survive in its current home, and that it somehow could be interesting if not useful when comparing that to some of its closer cousins on our side of the lake.

Might there be clues that let us make more robust some of our helpful bacteria? Or even clues to help combat some of the 'super-bugs' that are really scary in their resistance to anti-biotics, given the extent of nosocomial infection?

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

There's a good chance it has some neat antifreeze proteins. It's most likely very vulnerable to antibiotics, though; biological war far is an arms race. We can only learn from analysing the enemy and things similar to it.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

I don't think it's old enough for that. Eukarya appears 2 gya.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

...warfare. Ouch. The typos. They burns us, Bagginses.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

...Good call, although I still stand by the 16S rRNA inference. 86% whole-genome homology would place it well within known territory; there's more variety in Escherichia coli than that.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[jelizondo]

SAMANTHA!

IT'S PAST YOUR BEDTIME..

GET OFF THE COMPUTER NOW!

Filler to get past the stupid lameness filter, of course I'm yelling; it's a joke, for Christ's sake

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

I tried that last night. My homework didn't go away. This time I'm hoping it magically disappears while I'm posting on Slashdot.

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[jelizondo]

I truly appreciate the posts you made on this thread, I do.

But your homework is not going to dissappear, it will just become URGENT.

Take a break and get cracking!

I'm over 50, but still trying to complete a degree on telematics in the next year, so I know; homework sucks but if you don't get your nose in the grinder, it doesn't get done. Even if you know more about the subject that your professors, you still need to turn in good homework or they'll fail you.

Keep posting to enlighten us, poor ignorant souls, but don't give up on your homework, it will pay better!

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[Samantha Wright]

You may think you're very clever, young man, very clever—but it's linear algebra all the way down!

Re:Hope this doesn't go the way of arsenic life

[kermidge]

If you've got to go to Antarctica then it is far war, aina?

Good luck with the homework, and all the rest.

Life form unclassified? For pete's sake...

[RandomUsername99]

Make sure that nobody on the team that goes down there to further investigate is wearing a red shirt!

Re:Life form unclassified? For pete's sake...

[Tablizer]

Make sure that nobody on the team that goes down there to further investigate is wearing a red shirt!

Ensign: "That's strange, my shirt wasn't red until after I dived in."

Nuke it from orbit.

[Philosa]

It's the only way to be sure.

Re:Nuke it from orbit.

[Skapare]

I think that's what all those meteors have been trying to do. That is, unless they are bringing in the bacteria.

Re:Nuke it from orbit.

[Black Parrot]

Or, you know, expose it to tempratures and conditions that are really atypical for underground, freezing lakes...

IOW, nuke it?

The last radio report from the camp......

[Grayhand]

"Brainz, brainz, brainz! Send more geologists!"

It's believed the new bacteria could have unknown affects on the human body.

RUT ROH

[kheldan]

Cue the "disaster movie-of-the-week" music.

Re:Yes yes that's all very interesting ...

[Samantha Wright]

He was given a sample of water from the lake before they had punched through—so... ten years ago, I'd guess? At the latest?

Re:Welp, game over

[SternisheFan]

Whatever creature arises from this bacteria will either die off in a few days after exposure to modern germs, or we will just freeze it to death with the nearest fire extinguisher.

This find keeps hope alive for finding life in lakes on the outer planets. Very cool! This is why I like Slashdot, news like this.

Re:Welp, game over

[Samantha Wright]

Actually, there's a pretty good chance it'll die off before then. It's been isolated for at least half a million years (possibly a lot longer), and their drill bit was contaminated with at least sixteen species of other bacteria. You get the picture—entropy, genies, bottles, et cetera.

Re:in soviet russia we bacteria you

[Tablizer]

"In Soviet Russia, we infect bacteria"

Russian Science

[interval1066]

Did Big Foot find it by using magic crystals to communicate with aliens who have the technology to find bacteria?

Oh, what the trek!

[Tablizer]

"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."

Veet for Men Vs Unclassified Life Form

[Mageaere]

Go on, you know you were all thinking it.

Take care

[jimbirch]

Don't accept a salad sandwich from anyone connected with the Russian government until this is settled.

Things are really rockin' in Russia these days

[Mister Liberty]

Meteors, Lakes, Bacteria.
Now all we need is the Intelligent Designer of it all.
Yebatsya!

I'm Not Saying It is Aliens

[TuxWithoutPants]

But it's Aliens

I for one ...

[Skapare]

... welcome our new overlords!

Re:I for one ...

[greywire]

... welcome our unclassified and unidentified bacterial overlords! There, fixed that for you.

Wouldn't it be awesome if....

[Anonymous Coward]

we found extraterrestrial life on Earth. Like say we were digging in the ocean, or some sheet of ice somewhere and found extraterrestrial(not necessarily intelligent life but microbial).

Re:Wouldn't it be awesome if....

[BluPhenix316]

I think there was a debate about this already, a meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica that had fossilized microbial bacteria

So is this a 4th domain of life?

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Since the 3 current ones are Eukaryotes, Bacteria, and Archea.

Re:So is this a 4th domain of life?

[Black Parrot]

Since the 3 current ones are Eukaryotes, Bacteria, and Archea.

If the trend continues, it will have a two-syllable name.

Myanmar-Shave

[tepples]

I thought it was Myanmar now.

copper wire

[crakbone]

I wonder if it runs away from heated copper wire?

Finally....

[hesaigo999ca]

Russians are the first to start confirming reports that there is new DNA that is not our own on this planet....
they chose to bring it forth this way, but will eventually lead to actual confirmation of life from outer space and that they have arrived/landed....probably through a ship at the bottom of the lake.

Or I might have just finished watching x files marathon...take your pick.

In other news...

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

A team of Russian scientists suddenly went missing near Lake Vostok. The only clues left behind was a mysterious slime that covered their labs.

Sounds like another bad SyFy movie in the making.

Re:in soviet russia we bacteria you

[dotbot]

Well, it was entertaining to see Darwinism in action.

Call Kurt Russell, AKA MacReady

[bryan1945]

He's down for this.