Slo-mo Microbes Extend the Frontiers of Life 40
ananyo writes "A newly-discovered microbial community living tens of meters beneath the Pacific Ocean floor uses so little oxygen that researchers believe they may be living at the absolute minimum energy requirement needed to subsist. For years, scientists thought that the ascetic conditions of the deep sub-seabed — high pressure, minimal oxygen and a low supply of nutrients and energy — made such environments uninhabitable to any form of life. The discovery extends the lower bound for life (abstract). The surface of Mars, for instance, may be inhospitable, but there may be conditions below the surface that are reminiscent of the deep subsurface on Earth. As microbiologist Bo Jørgensen comments in the Nature piece, while the discovery does not mean there is life on Mars, 'it's now really challenging to show where there is no life.'"
Re:Life on Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, every time we try to say "This is the boundary where life cannot exist" we end up being proven wrong... Something tells me that if life has even a slim chance of finding a purchase on a rock floating around a star, it'll exist. Maybe not thrive, maybe not evolve nuclear bombs or Pepsi, but it will exist.
Re:Conversion rate (Score:2, Insightful)
Man, is there even anyone on Slashdot stupid enough to fall for this shit?
Yeah, I can see the morons on Facebook and Youtube being technically incompetent and gullible enough to fall for it, but here? Half of us aren't even running an OS this "software" runs on - hell, I'm pretty sure at least one regular user here is running an OS he wrote in his free time.
Talk about "zero return on investment".