New Type of Bacteria Reportedly Found in Buried Antarctic La

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http://news.yahoo.com/type-bacteria-rep ... 52174.html

Run for your lives! Its the Andromeda strain!

*Does not get reference*

They're saying its incredibly novel. Just making a zombie apocalypse quip.

Jokes aside it is a fascinating find, kind of like the cyano bacteria that were found a while back.

aside from premonitions of disaster, if bacteria can thrive in such harsh cold perhaps it gives reason to hope for similar life on Mars?

Perhaps the scientists reason for this study.

^ or Europa.

And there's definitely material for a sci-fi movie, here. The idea of organisms isolated from thr world for a million years in a lake below miles of ice (I wonder what they eat?) almost has a mythical feel to it, i.e. balrogs or cthulu.

Spacecraft, just like any other inhabitable environment, have living bacteria on their surfaces.

What I cant figure out is all of those alien abductees who get beamed up to saucers hovering above their backyards to be proded and probed before being tucked back into bed by the little gray men.

Howcome these human abductees dont get alien bacteria on thier skin and clothes?

If you and I were to rocket off to another solar system, and were to abduct and molest the locals we surely would accidently leave tell tale Earth bacteria on our victims.

You should be able to get all the alien bacteria you want from the hair and skin of any abductee, and not have to venture to some lake in Antarctica!

I'm wondering how these Russians found a lake 2 miles down. Were they building a vodka luge?

Sounds like a plan.

Martian girls...are easy!

Nah, just let the rednecks have some poetic justice.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3mE8RvQVOU[/youtube]

I would guess that they used seismic waves to try to find the depth of the ice, and that would have revealed the layer of liquid underneath.

They found this a few years ago and when they drilled, they deliberately stopped about 200m short because they needed to make sure they would not contaminate the lake. They used NASA's help to develop the technology to do this. Don't know what that technology was, but I doubt there is much threat. Just because a microbe can exist in such extreme conditions, does not mean it can survive in other sets of conditions. They wanted to understand how they survive in that environment so they can identify possible life-supporting environments in the solar system.

I would be interesting if they found something really new. It was only quite recently when Carl Woese separated the archaea from the bacteria, effectively making a third phylogenetic domain.
Another revolutionary find would be fun!

You would assume that bacteria living in an extreme environment like that would be archaean. But if these bugs are 86 percent different from anything else on earth (including archaea) then -it might well be a whole new kingdom of organisms.

But yes its niave to assume that just because something can survive in an extreme environment that is somehow a threat.

Camels can survive in the desert. But that doesnt make them a threat to nondesert animals. In fact camels probably became desert animals precisely because they could not handle the competition of living in desireable areas.

Bacteria that live in hot springs dont spread out and take over the planet- because TO THEM our normal environment is hostile and 'extreme'.

What's interesting about extremophiles is that they actually dominate the earth. We seem to be a bunch of eucaryotic snobs. Just because we are living in a certain set of conditions, we see it as the 'normal' range for life. The fact is that that bulk of the biomass on Earth in in the ground, the ocean, and the sea floor.
I read somewhere that 80% of life on earth lives permanently under 4 degrees Celcius. That is about the temp of the deep ocean floor, which covers so much of our planet. So there is also a phenomenal amount of pressure there as well. Add to that the polar regions, and the permafrosts which also contain methanogens, and you can see that life does indeed do well in the cold.
Those environments are quite steady and consistent. The surface has fluctuating temperatures, UV rays, dryness and floods, wind, salinity and acidity variation to deal with.

Who is the real extremophile?

That's probably why we drink as much as we do.

ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE

^ Hmm, those bacteria on Europa have friends in high places, I see. Well, no monolith is going to be the boss of me. Now, how do I get out of this box that's filled with stars?