Microbes Alive After Being Frozen for 32,000 Years 527
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting on a new type of bacteria that after being frozen 32,000 years in the Arctic was ready to swim, eat and multiply instantly upon being thawed. Researchers are excited because they're the sort of microbes that might thrive in the ice sea announced on Mars yesterday. The instant revival abilities mean a future mission, if it found anything on Mars, could conceivably culture it and bring it back alive. Maybe NASA could market them as Martian Sea Monkeys."
We're all dead!! (Score:5, Funny)
cane toads (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't bring them back!
I spit on your 32K years. Try 25M! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the bacteria were entirely dessicated, not just frozen, so it's a better model of the martian situation.
Re:I spit on your 32K years. Try 25M! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I spit on your 32K years. Try 25M! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber.
Cano RJ, Borucki MK.
A bacterial spore was revived, cultured, and identified from the abdominal contents of extinct bees preserved for 25 to 40 million years in buried Dominican amber. Rigorous surface decontamination of the amber and aseptic procedures were used during the recovery of the bacterium. Several lines of evidence indicated that the isolated bacterium was of ancient origin and not an extant contaminant. The characteristic enzymatic, biochemical, and 16S ribosomal DNA profiles indicated that the ancient bacterium is most closely related to extant Bacillus sphaericus.
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:5, Funny)
First thing the microbes did upon waking up... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:2)
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:2, Funny)
Great, haven't these idiots seen Alien?
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:4, Insightful)
This has happened often enough that it wouldn't be surprising to find that martian life was an awful lot like life here on earth.
Heck, there was an interesting discussion on the Mars Society lists about this a while back. With some off-the-cuff calculations of escape velocities, ejecta from planets due to impacts and outer bounds for bacterial spores survivals here on earth - even (especially?) in the frigid extremes of space - of 25 million or so, we were figuring bacteria could easily travel interstellar distances once they got past the odds against having been shot in the right direction.
Re:We're all dead!! (Score:4, Interesting)
reviving old diseases [independent.co.uk] left and right.
Mmm... microbe babes! (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't you be ready to eat and, uh, multiply if you had been without for 32,000 years?
Fark headline? (Score:5, Funny)
NASA scientists market Martian microbes as 'Martian sea monkies'. Hilarity ensues.
Re:Fark headline? (Score:5, Funny)
Hare-way to the Fark! (Score:2, Funny)
>
>NASA scientists market Martian microbes as 'Martian sea monkies'. Hilarity ensues.
Dehydrated martians? Yeah, I can work with that.
Audioedit: This bunny yelling " Run for the hills, folks! Or you'll be up to your armpits in Martians! [barbneal.com]"
K-9 wants steak?
Re:Fark headline? (Score:2)
Sea Monkies+Seamen= Seaciety
Now if only NASA can find some dude in an ally that will let them have his seamen by merly closing their eyes and sucking on a hose.
Hmm,... (Score:4, Interesting)
What? (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one,... (Score:5, Interesting)
But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years, and if it's there, we could do it very cheaply with an uncrewed sample return mission, using present-day technology. It's too bad that the average taxpayer thinks germs from another planet just don't sound very interesting.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years.
I suppose it depends how you define scientific discovery, but I'll stick with, I don't know, let's say the general theory of relativity. That theory (I'd call it a discovery) has pretty profound implications about the nature of our universe. On the other hand, Mars is just the next rock over; I wouldn't find it all that shocking if life were found there (although it would certainly raise some interesting questions).
Re:I, for one,... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're probably not a religious fundamentalist either. Remember, the vast majority of the religions on the planet make Earth out to be something special in "all of God's work", and challenging that with something like, "Life has come to be elsewhere without spawning from Earth" would be a real problem for many religions, assuming that the message about life spawning managed to reach the people in these congregations.
If religious leaders condemn it they could advocate open violence against anyone spreading the knowledge or believing it. Since there are a LOT of people who fall into the Fundamentalist category or are influenced by them this could have really nasty ramifications.
Most people can't handle a major change in their world view.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2, Insightful)
And I have proof: Look at human history.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2, Insightful)
Being an idiots increases your odds of being in the history books by a hundred times, as does being powerful. The few, the proud, the Idiotic Powerful are the ones that end up in history books, as opposed to the millions of froods that just had enough power to get by.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2)
What would be great is if both planets were seeded with life from another star system. I don't know how that could be proved though.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2)
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Insightful)
Could you handle it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I sure couldn't handle it, but I know people who could.
Re:Could you handle it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I don't normally, but I'll bite this time...
If God exists and did this, or part of this, and it was obvious to all of those involved that he actually did these things and that there was absolutely no other way that these things could have happened then those involved would have a reason to believe in him. Fact of the matter is that none of these things have happened to me or to anyone I know, and those that I know who claim that God did something in their lives that's overly special are either crazy or are so bad at stastics that they're not accounting for the 10x number of bad things that happen for the one "miracle" that is simply fortuitous coincidence.
The British didn't defeat the Spanish Armada in Queen Elisabeth I's day because God helped, they had several unexpected advantages. Likewise, 1910-1920 era Germany lost the first World War despite asserting to themselves in some national motto "God is Great." The man referred to as "Comical Ali" the Iraqi Information Minister continually ranted how the Americans were losing, and how Allah was going to see the Iraqi army to victory over the Infidels.
This is the same damn argument that Science has had with religion from the earliest days of the discipline; skeptics don't blindly accept "truth" simply because people insist that it's true. Continual restatement of a position doesn't have anything to do with reality.
Show me one 'miracle' and I'll show you ten anti-miracles, like my 30 year old friend who was a vegetarian and otherwise the picture of health who died of completely natural causes, not realising that she had pulmonary hypertension until it was far, far too late to do anything about it.
In the mean time, I'm not going to believe something transcribed by hand over generations, across multiple languages, and at times by organizations with manipulative agendas. It was also originally written by people who didn't understand the natural world like we do. I don't doubt many of the positive "lessons" that are the ultimate theme of the parables, but the exact verbatim message can't be literally interpreted in my opinion.
Re:Could you handle it? (Score:2)
Problems for religion (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of them will probably be happy accepting that it is "our kind of life" that is the special thing and that the existance of microbes etc elsewhere doesn't diminish how special us higher beings are. After all, most of them don't seem to like the thought that we and simpler organisms have common origins anyway.
blind eye (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never believed religion to be anything more than a crutch. It's a crutch for the immoral to have a reason to stay moral, just like law and prosecution are reasons for the crimin
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're speaking from a very US-centric view. There are very few people outside the US that fall into the sort of "fundamentalist" category that you are describing. There's nothing in the Torah or Koran that says that there's only life
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Insightful)
Christianity certainly makes humans special, but in no way precludes the existence of other extraordinary mortal creatures. Doing so would actually be inconsistent, since the scriptures mention other special creatures (angels and demons) which don't exist exclusively on Earth.
Therefore, even intelligent extraterrestrial life wouldn't pose a threat to Christian theology. Since Mars is expected (at best) to harbor
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with Christianity and all other religious beliefs is that they have no basis in any kind of facts or evidence and are therefore perfectly capable of changing to suit any situation.
We should listen to what Christian Theology has to say about life elsewhere with exactly the same weight as listening to the trilling of nightingales to tell us about life elsewhere since bo
Re:I, for one,... (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering it was formerly a commonplace view that other planets were populated, how would it even make sense for religions to be fundamentally opposed to the concept?
Can you please name a single religion with a dogma that specifically condemns the possibility of life on other worlds? Or are you just blindly opposed to religion?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, what about debris sent hurling through space fifteen or twenty degrees just past the Sun, spun by the Sun into a highly elliptic orbit, where it goes from in as far as the fringes of Mercury's orbit (abeit for a
Re:I, for one,... (Score:5, Insightful)
>greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years
I think it's impact would be much greater on the theological world than the scientific.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Interesting)
Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, and Wicca coul
Re:Theological Impact (Score:2, Interesting)
How I would have viewed it is that the Bible never says that God ONLY created life on Earth. The Bible says the Christ *died for teh sins* of humans, which the Bible implies are only on Earth. In other wo
Re:Theological Impact (Score:2)
You'll never live if you think this way. There are a lot of reasons I want most of my life back, but it won't happen. Even if you're as determined a pessimist as I can be, it's better to think of how bad things could get screwed up tomorrow than how bad they were screwed up yesterday.
I was never what you would describe as a "fundie nut", but like you, I found a considerable portion of my life dominated by Christianity. I'm not sure how you came to change, and it's really
Re:Theological Impact (Score:2)
Re:Theological Impact (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to agree with others here--it wouldn't bother me a bit (as a person who frequently gets labelled as a right-wing religious nut, but views himself as fairly tolerant and open about various ideas).
To me, there are so many ways that this fits in with what the Bible posits as the creation of the world, and then what my personal beliefs are. To me, it matters VERY LITTLE how the earth was formed and life began. I believe that God is responsible for it, and I also believe that he works through an a
Re:Theological Impact (Score:2)
However, just to raise an interesting point, Hinduism would be
A claim you might hear (Score:3, Funny)
Evolution seems to imply that each occurance of life is an independent event. If p(1)=10^-100 (boosted to 1 since life is observed), then p(2)=10^-200 (boosted to 10^-100)... Having a Creator boosts the probabilities to p(1)=1 (observed), p(2)=?? who knows? No rea
Re:A claim you might hear (Score:2)
Re:A claim you might hear (Score:5, Insightful)
And either of them doesn't really involve anything spectacularly improbable, and which can then be ascribed to a God/demi-God/alien/whatever. It just needs time. And time it had. Billions of years of it.
Statistics and large numbers are a funny thing. If you're one in a million, there are 6,000 just like you world-wide. Think about it. Because therein lies your answer: the key is very large numbers, not divine intervention. (And also that's the usual problem why people just don't get it: human brains has trouble working with really large numbers.)
Well, the same applies to both evolution and abiogenesis. No matter how improbable a mutation is to happen _and_ get passed on, given enough specimens over millions of years, it _will_ eventually happen. (Note, I said "improbable", not "impossible".)
Smaller mutations are easier: they happen all the time. An animal is born who's slightly smaller and faster than its parents. Another is born with slightly bigger claws. Another one is born who's slightly bigger and stronger, but needs more food. Etc.
From there it's merely a question of selection. Some of those deviations will give the animal more chances to survive and have offspring, some will make it less likely.
This affects the others too: the foxes that have an easier time finding food, might leave less food for the ones who don't. The mutated gazelle which runs faster, makes the _others_ an easier prey for lions. Etc. Essentially the most fit mutation puts the others at a disadvantage.
And you don't even need to believe in Darwinism to see that in action: artifficial selection is based on exactly the same kind of natural diversity, except the criterion who's the fittest is an artifficial human criterion, and the culling out the "unfit" is much faster.
See starting with dogs that looked like wolves, and ending up with the Pekinese. That was dilligent selection of those random mutations that were the closest to the desired end result: something (A) looking like a Chinese dragon, and (B) small enough to fit under the Emperor's tea table. It worked. Enough generations of selection turned a wolf ino the Pekinese.
Well, the same happens naturally too, only slower.
And here's the fun part: trying the same independently on two planets doesn't reduce the chances in any way. Your chances of rolling a 6 with a die are not influenced by my also rolling my own dice at the same time. The fact that you rolled a 6 doesn't say I can't roll a 6 too.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:2, Interesting)
Is anyone here qualified to say how clean we could guarantee the lander and its chamber would be? Disregard the technical complexities of the rest of the mission.
Re:I, for one,... (Score:3, Insightful)
So research should only be done to satisfy the interests of the wealthy and/or Wal-Mart?
What??? (Score:2)
strange meaning for "new" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:strange meaning for "new" (Score:2)
Re:strange meaning for "new" (Score:2)
It says "new type" not "type of new".
tardigrada (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:tardigrada (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh oh... (Score:2, Funny)
Honest Question (Score:3, Interesting)
--
matt
<insert sig here>
Re:Honest Question (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Honest Question (Score:3, Informative)
They can find out a lot of information because water and pollutants can travel all around the world and deposit in them.
I've also read about microbes being able to do the same thing.
As for this instance... well... google it.
Martian Life... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, maybe the right of universe is made up of right handed Amino Acids [nasa.gov] and we will be safe...
Re:Martian Life... (Score:2)
Re:Martian Life... (Score:3, Insightful)
1: Life does exist outside of Earth.
2: Mars has life.
3: Our immune system cannot adapt to (possible) extraterrestrial microbes.
4: The microbes would have the similar makeup of chemistry to interface with Earth Chemistry.
Of course you have an interesting.. You made up plenty of stuff. Lets find some microbes and then make wild-ass guesses.
Re:Martian Life... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Martian Life... (Score:2)
A martian bacterium would have all sorts of adaptations that allow it to live in its Martian environment. It would have to make special proteins and lipids for its cell wall, for example, to protect it on Mars that wouldn't be needed in your gut. All of these extra capabilities would put it at a comp
Re:Martian Life... (Score:2)
Or, flip that... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's easy enough to speculate on a vice versa: our modern earth bacteria are tough customers, honed by millennia of unending counter-immune war. Wimpy mars bacteria would cower in their meteorite, like preschoolers dumped in a rough biker bar.
Yes, scientific types, I'm blowing smoke, too. Vote me +1, funny.
Re:Martian Life... (Score:5, Insightful)
The germs that are most dangerous are ones that have evolved tricks to evade detection.
Germs from Mars would be the first against the wall when the T-cells rolled into town.
That's not how it worked IRL (Score:5, Interesting)
"The differenter the better" is good and fine, but at one point it becomes "different enough to not be detected". The immune system and its cells aren't a complete genetics lab, complete with a team of top-notch scientists, fully analyzing every cell and deciding if it belongs there or not. It reacts to certain patterns, but doesn't react at all to others. Things that they never had to detect, they might not. Or not reliably.
Or to put it otherwise, that too is the result of evolution, rather than intelligent design. Being able to detect and solve problems that actually could kill the animal before it reproduced, were obviously favoured by natural selection. Having an immune system that reacts to viruses and bacteria you meet every day, now that's the kind of thing that natural selection is all about.
On the other hand, having an immune system capable of reacting to fundamentally different stuff, that's never even been there in millions of years, that's something _not_ enforced by natural selection. You can be born, grow up, reproduce, and die, without ever needing to heal from a martian flu.
In fact, au contraire: there's a good evolutionary reason to _not_ evolve an over-reacting immune system. See the auto-immune Type 1 diabetes where your pancreas is destroyed by your own immune system. Individuals with an immune system even more strict than that, got themselves out of the gene pool.
And evolution can be even more perverse than that. There are a whole bunch of genetic diseases or other disfunctions, which didn't get filtered out by billions of years of selection, nor get defenses evolved against them, because they made no difference in reproduction rates. Either because:
A) The're very rare recessive genes. Individuals could be "the fittest", even while carrying these genes. Or
B) They kill you after the age where you've already reproduced. E.g., skin cancer. Stuff that could kill you in your thirties-fourties wasn't a priority to evolve defenses against, when those hominids lived less than half that.
Basically all I'm saying is: I wouldn't be _that_ sure. There are good chances that, yes, the germs from mars would be the first against the wall. But as history shows, there are also non-zero chances that they won't.
Re:Martian Life... (Score:3, Insightful)
oh wait... heh.
immune systems attack anything remotely suspicious and sometimes even things that they shouldnt, like ones own cells. thats what an allergic response is. martian bacteria wouldn't do anything pathologically interesting compared to what millions of years of bacterial evolution have done on earth.
Have you *never* seen (Score:5, Funny)
Sometimes its a good idea to leave that frozen stuff the way you found it.
Still No Martians (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a great discovery, but only for what it tells us about what things were like 32,000 years ago. Everytime something like this is discovered everybody immediately jumps up and down about life on Mars. At this point it's pretty damn clear that life has found ways to survive everywhere on Earth from the highest clouds to somewhere around the planet's core. But it didn't start there. All of these discoveries are the harshest possible environments on Earth- but they're more like the best conditions on Mars. In fact each new discovery makes the odds of finding life on Mars less- if it's so easy to find life in such amazingly cold and barren conditions why have we still found nothing on Mars that isn't, at best, something that isn't easily made by simple geological (areological?) chemical processes? (But also, sometimes, are by-products of living things.)
Then again no one's gotten a chance to really peak under any Martian rocks. Yet...
Re:Still No Martians (Score:2)
Good point, but if life evolved when Mars was warmer and wetter, frozen in the seas might be Martian extremophiles who were the last to succumb to their climate change.
Why are there so many 5, Funnys? (Score:2, Funny)
How to date ice, and bring it home to your mother (Score:3, Informative)
(which is looking at tree rings to determine their age). Ice cores [secretsoftheice.org]
have similar striations which can be counted to determine the age of the
surrounding ice.
And I couldn't find a link, but I thought at one point
scientists were looking at the air composition inside the ice and comparing
it to historical atmospheric ratios of gasses to date things.
Re:How to date ice, and bring it home to your moth (Score:3, Informative)
That's dendrochronology. "Endochronology" has to do with study of some of the odder properties of thiotimoline [wikipedia.org].
but we still don't know all bacteria on Earth (Score:3, Insightful)
Global Warming Safety Net (Score:3, Insightful)
Or then again, maybe everyone else is right and they are just going to kill us.
What are these "new" bacteria related to? (Score:2, Interesting)
The abstract [sgmjournals.org] of the research paper says that this 'new' bacteria, Carnobacterium pleistocenium, has a 99.8% similarity to Carnobacterium alterfunditum, as determined by gene sequence. I don't have access to this journal, so perhaps someone can fill in the details (how do these frozen bacteria differ from their modern day relatives and/or descendants?).
Phylochronology [confex.com] is a new field that proposes studying molecular evolution on both spatial and temporal scales, using the tools of aDNA [plosbiology.org] and paleontology. He
Re:What are these "new" bacteria related to? (Score:2, Informative)
"
Not quite. 99.8% refers to the similarity between a specific gene common to both (all) bacteria. The gene in question codes for ribosomal RNA of the 16s subunit. It is required for protein synthesis. Due to its importance not too many mutations normally occur in it. Most mutations are lethal.
Overal their DNA was only 39 % the same. Unfortunately I don't have full access either
The Deadly Mantis (queue horror music) (Score:2, Funny)
Panspermia and previously thawed 2800 yo bacteria (Score:5, Informative)
The more interesting question about possible unicellular organisms in Mars is whether they share a common ancestor with Earth's unicellular organisms or did they develop independently of each other. If there is a link/common ancestor, then the currently weak theory of panspermia (life exists and is distributed throughout the universe in the form of germs or spores) [google.com] would have a big boost in support. Also see this article about possible space bugs [space.com] written over 2 years ago.
Two issues (Score:3, Insightful)
What's with this culture of "one scientific team says so, so it is an absolute fact"? That's why you all were suckered by the "methane from life" claim that turned out to have been a misinterpreted overheard conversation at a party.
2. Why was Mars even mentioned at all? We're talking about Earth life here; if there is any life on Mars, it will likely be playing by significantly different "rules" at a molecular level. This discovery on its own was neat; no need to try and jazz it up by trying to distantly connect it with Mars.
New type? (Score:5, Funny)
This is obviously a meaning for the word new I hadn't previously come across
32000 years? Big deal! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:32000 years? Big deal! (Score:3, Informative)
The cells are certainly not 16 million years old.
Edible Fish in Kolyma Ice Lens (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:All hype about this but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm also confident in my belief that we could find new minerals on mars, or other planets that could be put to good use as well.
Re:Well, so will I (Score:2)
I'd probably also do a lot of catching up on
Re:Didn't I see this.... Ice man's revenge or (Score:2)
Heh
Re:what an idea (Score:3, Funny)
Yes. Let's try to make yogurt with them.
You can try the first batch.
Re:Yet Another Reason To Worry About Global Warmin (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yet Another Reason To Worry About Global Warmin (Score:3, Informative)
I recall reading about how in some scandinavian country they found a body of a man who died of the 1918 influenza pandemic (one of the worst flu strains ever, millions died) that was frozen in some tundra. They set up a quarantine area around him while he was recovered, lest the extremely contagious and deadly form of the flu in him get loose.