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Strange Bacteria Sustains Itself Without Sunlight
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Oct 20, 2006 04:12 AM
from the deep-dark-places dept.
from the deep-dark-places dept.
Hahnsoo writes "A colony of bacteria found 2.8 kilometers below the Earth's surface in a South African gold mine is able to sustain itself without energy from the Sun. While sub-surface colonies of microorganisms utilizing sulfur (mostly near deep sea hydrothermal vents) is not new, this particular colony is unusual. The colony does it by relying on radioactive uranium to split water into hydrogen gas. Thus, instead of solar energy and photosynthesis, this species relies on radioactive materials and sulfur/hydrogen to facilitate its energy needs. There is some speculation about life on other planets in the article as well."
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Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
We manage to sustain ourselves using colonies of microorganisms utilising twinkie bars and coke (mostly near mom's fridge).
We rely on radiation from our CRT monitors and heat from mom's washing machine to act as a catalyst converting the food bars into into methane gas. Thus instead of having a nice basement, its a desolate wasteland where noone would dare to tread.
There is some speculation about how life evolved inside such places (or should that be devolved).
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, more true than many would realize...
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:4, Informative)
Biggest problem I see with the guys is that they look like 3's but ignore any female less than a 7.
Either fix yourselves up a bit or make your standards a bit more realistic.
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Informative)
1: CLEAN TEETH - Buy soft dental picks- easier than flossing and smaller than a toothbrush. They sell them in packs of 50. (This becomes a huge issue in your 40's when the rest of the guys start losing their teeth.)
2: CLEAN BODY (relative to your country's standards). She shouldn't be distracted by the blackheads on your nose.
3: SMILE - and say her name. The most important word in any language is a person's name. It gets their attention in a crowded room almost instantly.
4: Avoid "one itis" / "your my soul mate". I.e. KID them a bit. If no interest- move on to find someone who is.
5: Flirt with every female regardless of age or appearence. Boosting other's egos and giving them a reason to smile is a worthwhile thing for a human to do for others. It helps you because you get over only flirting for sex and "true love."
Also: Ignore every romantic lie you see in movies. If you act the way most romantic movies show you to in real life you are going to creep her out/be "too heavy" or would even be stalking/setting yourself up for an injunction. Despair.com says it best. "Persistance: It's Over Dude. Let Her Go."
The truth is knights in shining armor were pretty vulgar lusty dudes. Women are not attacted to wimpy guys.
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Strange slashdotter sustained without sunlight (Score:5, Funny)
So now we have (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So now we have (Score:5, Funny)
If Steve Irwin were still alive, he would capture it, thoroughly describe it to the viewers at home, shove his thumb up it's butt, and then say "Crikey, its a naughty boy!"
prior art (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this news? Clearly you've never been to a Linux User's Group meeting.
Well (Score:4, Funny)
This is strange? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This is strange? (Score:5, Funny)
And don't try to tell me it goes off when you close the door, cause I open it real fast sometimes and it is definately always on.
I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:5, Insightful)
What's important is that this example shows that we also do not really know what is necessary to sustain life. Some things are obvious - the right kind of solvent, water being almost irreplaceable, some source of energy, etc. However, our understanding of the details is still insufficient. In this case we see that radiation, which is viewed as detrimental to life, even though life can adapt to tolerate it, can actually have an opposite role. Can life emerge with only radiation as an energy source? We don't really know, we can doubt it but we can't exlude it as a possibility. Once it's there, can it survive? Now we know, yes.
This opens new possibilities. For example, we have to be more careful when saying that some kind of object in space cannot support life. With what we learned from this, life could even exist on/in interstellar debris, comets etc., where there is definitely not enough sunlight, as long as there are some radioactive elements there - not too little, not too much, but how can we tell where to draw the line? I'm not saying that life exists in such places, only that now we have to accept such a possibility.
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, and I think Shakira would have a great time spending a weekend naked with me, but I kind of suspect it might not be true....
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can accept this, then realize there are two more things that follow naturally.
1. this has happened before. Probably more than once. The "spark of life" likely happened repeatedly over the eons on earth and was simply snuffed out by a falling rock or blob of lava or unfriendly temperatures or a sudden shift of pH or whathaveyou. The one that eventually led to what we consider "life" here just got a little luckier than the rest.
2. since this is already being attributed to absurd chance, take a gambler's perpective on it. If the odds of winning one lottery are one in a million, and the odds of winning another lottery are one in five million, and we have already seen someone win the $1m lottery, is it sensible to say that no one can win the $5m lottery because the odds are too low? If you have already seen the high odds fail to deny a winner, why does making the odds a little worse suddenly preclude the possibility?
Really, it doesn't matter what the odds are, so long as they are nonzero. If you roll the dice enough times it doesn't matter. Everything that can happen eventually will happen.
True, it would be easier for life to evolve into this radiation-sustained form from another form of life, but it's certainly not impossible for genesis in that situation. Just a lot less likely. But when you are talking about things that have the patience of and that operate on the timescale of genesis or evolution, if the odds are one in a billion you may as well say it's going to happen sometime this morning.
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:4, Insightful)
generations are pulled slowly enough down that they have time to adapt
there shouldn't be an issue.
It doubt it happened in 1 generation , probably took millions of
generations and who knows how many centuries or millenia or even
longer.
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:5, Funny)
Hindenburg disaster? (Score:5, Informative)
"Hydrogen gas is highly energetic if it reacts with oxygen or other oxidants like sulfate, as the Hindenburg disaster demonstrated."
What's the point of adding these sorts of comments? It's it widely understood that the actual flames captured on the footage was in fact from the covering and paint of the Hindenburg, not the hydrogen which would have very rapidly dissapated in the first place?
Re:Hindenburg disaster? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's partly true. The burning covering provided the soot that was able to glow and make the flames visible. Hydrogen flames are almost invisible.
However, urban legends about the extreme flammability of the doping notwithstanding, there is NO WAY a vessel the size of the Titanic could be vaporized in 30 seconds, throwing a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air, unless the reaction was driven mainly by the burning hydrogen gas. The gas did dissipate quickly; it just happened to be burning as it did.
No sunlight needed? (Score:4, Informative)
Bacteria, in general, do not use photosynthesis. A few do, but very few. What bacteria use for an energy source varies quite a bit, actually. But it's certainly not strange for a bacteria to not need sunlight, since the vast majority don't.
Technically, these aren't event bacteria. They're extremophiles which means they fall in the Archae domain, not the Bacteria domain. But maybe I'm being too picky.
Re:No sunlight needed - Exactly ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad title, I do realize. It should be "Strange Bacteria Sustains Itself Without Dependence on Photosynthetic-based Food Chain"
all the bacteria in our digestive track surely relies on sunlight for life (tounge-in-cheek)
It isn't that everything else, including the bacteria in your gut, relies directly on sunlight for photosynthesis [wikipedia.org] that it performs iteself, but rather that the entire food chain [wikipedia.org] depends on photosynthesis as the underlying energy-fixating process.
The bacteria in your GI tract rely on the food you eat, which is either plants (photosynthetic autotrophs) or animals (heterotrophs feeding on photosynthetic autotrophs).
Every part of life that you are used to ultimately depends on photosythesis as the source for the energy in the food chain.
Exceptions are rare, which is why this is interesting. Chemosynthetic organisms [wikipedia.org] (such as archaea and other extremophiles), are found near deep sea hydrothermal vents, using geothermal heat as the source energy. These South African bacetria are a second type of chemosythetic ecosystem.
It appears that these newly discovered bacteria in South Africa are chemotrophs using hydrogen and sulfates, with radiation being the underlying energy source, with no underlying food-chain-based dependency on photsynthesis.
Re:Fuel source? (Score:4, Funny)
OK, before someone else says it, it's not green at all because living without sunlight it has no chlorophyll!
Re:Fuel source? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, these are natural uranium ores in South Africa.
The radioactive half-life of uranium [wikipedia.org] is in the order of 100 millions of years for the two common isotopes of uranium that the radioactivity of itself is not very significant.
Radioactive materials used for power-production from radioactive decay itself (see radioisotope thermoelectric generator [wikipedia.org]) use radioisotopes with half-lives of tens to hundreds of years.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:4, Funny)
First let me say that I am going to let anyone who want look up whatever they want. I will leave enough key words around to do the job.
The concept of life doing nuclear reactions is not new. In 1799 Joseph Priestly doing a study on hens discovered that they emitted as egg shells and waste about 2 to 4 grams of Calcium not taken in by their diet. The process at the time was called "Transmutation of Elements." Subsequently it has been found that bean sprouts transmutate several elements including manganese into iron. (The top of the fusion energy set). This has been studied by the US Army and by the French Nuclear researchers. It is real. There are two Nobel prizes in the 1970's related to this.
Nuclear reactors typically the type of the US Navy get problems with bacterial growth in their main cooling loops that cause blockage and cause the requirement for repairs.
For those who are doing a bit of thinking.... (I know its really hard sometimes.) The process is now pretty well known and mapped out. The mitochondria of cells can and do Fusion reactions as well as some Fission reactions. In the hens if the making of potassium into calcium was their only reaction, they would heat up like a really big nuclear reactor. Fortunately for us all, the hens also do ENDOTHERMIC (heat absorbing) atomic reactions as well. The upshot of this shows up in a lot of places. It explains the differences in content of geologic sediments from their parent rocks. It explains a lot of other things as well. Life is very much a factor in the atomic mixture we find on a planet. What is more it completely messes up our cosmology. Yes you can get fusion without the nuclear containments of a star. In fact that isn't even needed at all in the whole universe.
Curiously there has not been found any major geologic structure on earth that doesn't contain life. It probably penetrates to the core. I would suspect from this that the assumptions about life are all wrong. It is probably true that the entire universe is alive at every location to some degree. In terms of the science called Chemistry it also says that what we view atomic fission and fusion reactions as merely a spectrum of the chemical reaction series with Chemistry at the low end, Fission higher and Fusion still higher. There is also no prospect that this is the top of reactions.
The purpose of this posting is to stimulate people into looking into the realities of our world rather than having them accept what they are spoon fed in school. (Your teacher and your textbooks might just be WRONG!) At the present there are several advancing sciences with working technologies that are pushing back the walls in energy and gravity research. Real breakthroughs have occured and they violate the "Rules" that are accepted. If your search engine is working, you might find some curious with reproducable experimental apparatus on the Anti-Gravity front out of Brazil using thermionic currents and mu metal. (Achieved -1.25 G! and the apparatus and methods are published!) There are published at least 4 technologies that generate energy without fuel and they all can be reproduced. --- Wake up! Science is a baby not a grown up art.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they do not violate the rules. They merely overcome them or clarify them. An anti-gravity device using thermionic currents for example, does not violate the laws of gravity. It applies the required amount of propulsion to overcome gravity, using thermionic currents. We also have anti-gravity devices using rocket fuel, or hot air. None of them violate the rules.
Answers (Score:5, Informative)
(b) It's not practical to use its radioactivity as a power source, however, because it's only mildly radioactive in the natural state; said another way, it's not appreciably warm, so the amount of heat given off of natural uranium due to its radioactivity is negligible.
(c) Most (nearly all) human-generated nuclear waste has the same answer as (b); of that that is appreciably warm, there's too little of it to be useful as a power source.
(d) You got it.
Note that the bacteria do not use radioactivity directly, but rather use hydrogen from their environment, made from decomposing water exposed to radioactivity, as an energy source. Again from TFA: "This fracture water contained hydrocarbons and hydrogen not likely to have been created through biological processes, but rather from decomposition of water exposed to radiation from uranium-bearing rocks."
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
It is not viable for large scale power, since you would need so much Uranium and other material to get megawatts of power out of it. I think they can make them out of Plutonium too (which is not naturally occurring)
Nuclear "waste" is already converted back into fissile material, if material is radioactively hot it is pretty easy to extract energy from. It's the stuff that is slightly radioactive with a long half life that is not very useful and becomes low grade waste.
Please explain what is "creepy" about fission? Seems like a better deal than burning oil. What is the point of having an electric car if you're just going to charge it by burning coal and oil?
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
Electric motors are much more efficient.
Electricity can come from non-polluting sources.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years.
Pollution from a few sources is more easily managed and disperses less than from millions of ground level sources.
Electric cars are simpler mechanically, more reliable and easier to repair.
Electric cars accelerate faster and can use regenerative braking.
Existing range limitations can be overcome with improved battery chemistry.
see www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com to see why we're not driving them and why all the EV1's were destroyed.
Offtopic but you did ask.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
It will the minute the US's demand for it doubles quicker than we can build new infrastucture.
In terms of raw energy consumption, the total amount of energy the US consumes as electricty from some source right now is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy we use burning gasoline in cars.
Switch to electric cars in any sort of accelerated timeframe, and watch electricity prices go up just as quick as oil is now.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
You name three accidents. Chernobyl was admittedly a disaster, but the other two didn't even result in any injuries. So, that's like a grand total of one nuclear disaster. Now, how many people has coal power killed? Hundreds of thousands of miners, perhaps millions more who have suffered from the pollution and - yes - radioactivity released into the atmosphere by coal plants.
Coal power is responsible for more cancer than any nuclear accident ever, including Chernobyl. Think about it.
Thirdly, terrorism. You don't get coal-fired suicide bombers.
You don't get fission suicide bombers either, so what the fuck is your point supposed to be?
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:4, Informative)
Its worth making clear as well that the Chernobyl design was a 50 year old one that was known to be risky. Modern designs are not.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
Chernobyl, Windscale, Three Mile Island.
Chernobyl was a very serious incident. WHO attributed 56 direct deaths and possibly as many as extra 4000-6000 cancer deaths in the long term. (source 1) [bbc.co.uk], (source 2) [nature.com]. However, you can't compare the Chernobyl reactor to western reactors of that day and age and certainly not to new types of reactors with passive safety. Three Mile Island is considered to be worlds' second worst nuclear accident. The death toll? 0. Compare that to the thousands of people that die in Chinese coal mines every year. (source) [chinadaily.com.cn]
We're told that current nuclear plants are safe, and not like the ones that exploded or went up in flames. At the time the plants which are now acknowledged to be dangerous were being constructed, the public were also told that they were completely safe. The public can be forgiven for not believing that an industry with a history of serial lies on safety is now both safe and
truthful about it for once.
They ARE safe, even the ones that were being built back then. There is no such thing as 100% safety but the safety record of western nuclear power plants is way better than any other industry. Bhopal anyone?
Also, I don't suppose they were actually intending to have any accidents, or for some of the radioactive leaks - though BNFL's own propaganda admits they deliberately discharged nuclear waste into the sea. Humans make mistakes, which is another reason nuclear isn't trusted.
That's why we need to keep investing ways to make better use of nuclear fuel. A lot of promising research has been done in that area, like the Integral Fast Reactor [wikipedia.org], which by the way is even safer than contempary reactors.
Thirdly, terrorism. You don't get coal-fired suicide bombers.
It's a lot easier to blow up a refinery, which would cause vastly more damage. Containment buildings are actually built to withstand a 747 flying into it.Simple Nuclear Chemistry Lesson (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, uranium is naturally radioactive. Much of nature is naturally radioactive, including you, incidentally. There is a certain amount of what is called "background radiation" around you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there would still be even if no human had ever drawn a single breath. Uranium just happens to be quite a bit more radioactive than you are, owing to its nuclear structure.
Now, uranium like most metals doesn't come in handily available lumps in the natural world, but is found in ores: the ore is called pitchblend, in the case of uranium. Humans extract pitchblend (at a ratio of a few pounds of pitchblend to a lot of tons of boring old rock), extract the uranium, and then refine/enrich the uranium so that we get the exact isotopes of it we need for our nuclear power/weapons needs. (Isotopes are the same element, except with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus. Different isotopes of elements have vastly different radioactive properties. For example, the most common isotope of hydrogen isn't radioactive at all, and your body contains a heck of a lot of the stuff. The least common isotope of hydrogen, tritium, has two neutrons in it, and is used for making hydrogen bombs.)
So there are essentially three ways an atom can alter the configuration of its nucleus and release energy. Number one, it splits off into two atoms (fission). Number two, it fuses with another atom (fusion). Number three, it spits out something that was in its nucleus (radioactive decay -- there are a couple of types of this, producing radiation of various levels of danger -- alpha decay, for example, can be stopped with a piece of paper, gamma decay on the other hand will penetrate a meter of concrete). You can cause fission by manipulating radioactive decay in the right way, but it will happen really bloody slowly over time regardless -- uranium, for example, has a half life in the millions of years, which means that of a given sample it will take millions of years for one half of it to radiate and transform into whatever the next step is. Now, a bit of pitchblend just sitting on the counter isn't going to be useful for much of anything, although if you handle it for a few months or years you're at an elevated risk of getting cancer (and if you get radium, a radioactive gas, in your lungs, well, its less than good for you). So you can't, say, just chuck it in a specially designed miniature nuclear power plant and have it power your refrigerator. But a comparitively small amount of the concentrated, refined stuff (a few tens or hundreds of kilograms, as I recall), plus a nuclear plant designed to accelerate the fission faster than it occurs in nature, can literally power a city for years.
Nuclear power, even with the downside of producing harmful radiation (which is almost totally controllable, incidentally), is already very useful. Several countries and many, many communities are dependent on it to keep the lights running, the computers playing WoW, and air conditioners conditioning, the welders welding, and all those electricity-using things modern society depends on. If you're an environmentally concerned sort, you might also be happy to know that it generates extraordinarily little pollution compared to the refinement and combustion of fossil fuels.
This lesson in nuclear chemistry has been brought to you by the letter U and the number 235.
Re:Yea, and when it explodes/melts down (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have a source for that figure?
all of the examples you gave above are cleanable to an extent.
You do realise that coal-fired plants release radioactive waste into the atmosphere during normal operation, right?
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/adaptation/nuclear_p
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text
http://www.epa.gov/radtown/coal-plant.htm [epa.gov]
But feel free to google it for more; they're just the top few results for a search for "coal power station radioactivity".
Re:Yea, and when it explodes/melts down (Score:4, Informative)
yep, and to add to your point, chernobyl did not kill everything within a 10km radius, nor is it "uncleanable" - in fact nature has done so well at cleaning it up / living with it since (most of) the humans left, that people are talking about making it a nature reserve: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4923342.s
You are so right (Score:5, Insightful)
"More than 4,000 coal miners have died in accidents in Ukraine since 1991." Radio Free Europe
Thats Ukraine alone. Worldwide? In China? God knows.
Now for Chernobyl:
"Total eventual deaths due to radiation could reach 4,000, including those of evacuees, a statistical prediction based on estimated doses they received. But, "as about a quarter of people die from spontaneous cancer not caused by Chernobyl radiation, the radiation-induced increase of only about 3 per cent will be difficult to observe". Times of London
Since Chernobyl was by far the worst that death count is close to the number of people killed ever in Nuclear accidents (There were some secret problems in the USSR but no one knows.). Throw in the cancers caused by radiation from soft coal combustion and nukes win hands down as a safe alternative. Okay, the pollution is dirty but it is point source and manageable, whereas CO2 is dispersed and systemic and no one knows how dangerous.
Very frustrating to see how fear of nuclear weapons (a legitimate concern) spilled over into irrational fear of nuclear power.
Nevertheless economic and political forces conspire to prevent the nuclear industry from making a comeback. I think a major political PR initiative is need. Homer Simpson your country calls.
Re:Please... (Score:5, Informative)
The hydrogen and sulfur components are likely released as part of volcanic activity. which is not sunlight driven, although it is driven through the energy released due to the effect of solar gravity on the Earth's core.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to drive here. Likely the bacteria's ancestors required sunlight to survive, if you are so interested in associating sunlight with everything.
Actually, that's not entirely correct (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, that's not entirely correct. No star we know produces elements heavier than iron and nickel, which aren't very radioactive. In fact, they're the most stable nuclei we know.
The thing is, anything lower than iron and nickel tends to release energy when fused into something heavier. Anything heavier than that needs to absorb energy to fuse into something even heavier, and conversely releases some energy when split.
So eventually the reaction stops at iron and nickel. Given intense photon bombardment in the star, most nickel actually disintegrates right back into smaller nuclei, not fuse further into heavier stuff. Iron pretty doesn't do anything whatsoever, and just stays iron.
The thing there is that as you move upwards, the energy and temperature requirements tend to be insane. For example for the next step up from fusing hydrogen into helium, it takes a red giant and temperatures of about 100 _million_ Kelvin to even fuse helium into carbon before blowing itself up.
And most stars either (A) stop short of even that and become a red dwarf, or (B) blow themselves up within seconds when they start fusing helium, because that's a very unstable reaction, whose rate increases with temperature, and temperature increases with fusion rate.
But at any rate, even if you had a star massive enough, you wouldn't get many nuclei past iron, or you wouldn't get them out of the star. By the moment a star got massive and hot enough to start fusing iron into something heavier, it would just rapidly lose heat in that reaction. It just can't explode that way, so at most you'd get a black hole in the end of it all.
So since you mention stars exploding... well, that's actually where the heavier elements come from. Supernovae don't just spread those heavier metals, they _create_ them. The iron, carbon, helium and whatever else was created will be smashed with tremendous amounts of energy and at insane temperatures, and a lot of it will fuse into heavier stuff. And since the star is already blowing up, they'll get spread all over the place.
Re:Please... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. Every element heavier than helium was created primarily either in the core of a star (up to iron), during a nova (almost everything else) or as a decay product of the radioactive decay of a heavier element (which was created during a nova or similar event).
The big bang created hydrogen and a little helium; we have stars to thank for everything else.
Re:Please... (Score:4, Funny)
As long as they don't expect us to thank each and every one of them personally...
Re:Please... (Score:5, Interesting)
As Carl Sagan said, "We are all made of starstuff.".
Re:Please... (Score:5, Funny)
As the worm said, "We are all made of Saganstuff."
Re:Good news for life on earth (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Of course they cannot. Bacteria (and life in general) work only in the domain of electromagnetic and gravitational forces. They cannot influence the rate of decay of any nucleus in any way.
Imagine a ..... (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, we have something to pit against Beowolf.