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Lake Vostok Found Teeming With Life
jpyeck writes "Lake Vostok, Antarctica's biggest and deepest subsurface lake, might contain thousands of different kinds of tiny organisms — and perhaps bigger fish as well, researchers report. The lake, buried under more than 2 miles (3.7 kilometers) of Antarctic ice, has been seen as an earthly analog for ice-covered seas on such worlds as Europa and Enceladus. It's thought to have been cut off from the outside world for as long as 15 million years. But the latest results, reported in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that the lake isn't as sterile or otherworldly as some scientists might have thought. More than 3,500 different DNA sequences were identified in samples extracted from layers of ice that have built up just above the surface of the lake."
They should get one of the clipboard guys to chug a bottle and see if he mutates.
That ends badly
H.P. Lovecraft and lots of strange DNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
...it turns out to be life as we know it
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Because if they correspond to already known species, then it's just contamination.
...I'd shock it with a giant does of chlorine.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Bah. More bad science journalism. Everybody knows scientests hardly ever fuck.
See if anything floats to the surface? Probably the easiest way to confirm.
So where am I supposed to get clean water for my scotch?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
If you read TFA, you'll see that 1) they did sequence DNA, 2) they found many, many species which are not the usual ones associated with contamination due to methodology, and 3) they found organisms that can theoretically survive in the extreme and varied environments believed to be present in the lake (thermophiles near suspected geothermal areas, halophiles in brackish/salty water, etc). As a microbiologist, I find it fascinating that the authors not only provide a list of species, but go so far as to paint a complete picture of how each could possibly exist in a completely functioning ecosystem. For example, they found organisms responsible for carbon and nitrogen fixation, and hypothesize that these same species will also be found throughout the lake water in their various niches.
There is probably a civilization of super piranha, that have been surviving by cannibalism for 15 million years, creating a race of super big, super powerful, mean, man eating monsters.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Could we please stop saying "more than" in scientific contexts, except when needed? This phrase is intended to denote situations where we just know a lower boundary of the correct value, but in recent time it's being (ab-)used mostly for a dramatic effect. I really wish people would either give precise figures, or when this is not practical, use the words invented to mark numbers as approximations, like "roughly" or "about". Statistically speaking, the difference is that "roughly" implies an effort to find a "simple" number close to the correct expectation value, but "more than" implies we picked just some number that's surely below the confidence interval.
So all frozen and liquid water was exactly the same for billions of years on Earth and it's impossible for any single celled organisms to have snuck in at any given time due to freezing, unfreezing, and water moving? Wow, amazing! What a self-contained astronomical quarantine!
This is just great. Now we will see that if there environment rises .001 degrees they will be wiped out and it will be our fault. Could we please go back to the 1980s when we were going to cause another global ice age! /end sarcasm
Life...hmm...uh...will...uh...find a way.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Sounds like a Siffy Channel Original Movie.. Cut! Print! :p
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm fairly sure that the GP was making a reference to the sci-fi novel "The Legacy of Heorot" by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. Specifically, the life cycle of "Grendels".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot
But when they do, they tend to f**k all of humanity.
I do metagenomics in a Deep Biosphere project and have to wonder how this article even got published. I mean, 80% contamination rate is just insane. We've been plagued by contamination as well (1-3% that I can tell). Sure, it's easy to filter out e.g. human sequences from the data, but what about the 1,000 or so bacterial species that live on the human skin? They conveniently skip this part in the article..
I can explain the wide variety of genetic material in the water sample: one of the researchers was clearly into bestiality and possessed both a taste for a wide range of different species as well as poor hygiene. As for what he was doing with the borehole, we'll leave as an excercise for the reader.
[...], a tardigrade (closest to Milnesium sp., a hardy, predatory, cosmopolitan, freshwater species; 93% identity) [...]
Outer space, inside of an electron microscope, under a million-year-old ice sheet, whatever. Water bear don't care.
... I'd let you.