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Newfound Bacteria Expand Tree of Life
An anonymous reader writes: It used to be that to find new forms of life, all you had to do was take a walk in the woods. Now it's not so simple. The most conspicuous organisms have long since been cataloged and fixed on the tree of life, and the ones that remain undiscovered don't give themselves up easily. You could spend all day by the same watering hole with the best scientific instruments and come up with nothing. Maybe it's not surprising, then, that when discoveries do occur, they sometimes come in torrents. Find a different way of looking, and novel forms of life appear everywhere. A team of microbiologists based at the University of California, Berkeley, recently figured out one such new way of detecting life. At a stroke, their work expanded the number of known types — or phyla — of bacteria by nearly 50 percent, a dramatic change that indicates just how many forms of life on earth have escaped our notice so far.
"It used to be that to find new forms of life, all you had to do was take a walk in the woods."
True if looking for leprechauns; but not mermaids.
I still haven't found the leprechaun, let alone caught him. But I did find a box of lucky charms once.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.