Bacteria Found Alive In Ice 120,000 Years Old 326
FiReaNGeL notes research presented this morning at Penn State on the discovery of a new, ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles. From the psu.edu announcement: "The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen, and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system. This new species is among the ubiquitous, yet mysterious, ultra-small bacteria, which are so tiny that they are able to pass through microbiological filters. Called Chryseobacterium greenlandensis, the species is related genetically to certain bacteria found in fish, marine mud, and the roots of some plants."
Young earth creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:2, Insightful)
He is saying it's another piece of scientific evidence that shows that then literal translation of the most recent translation of the Bible is wrong.
Of course anyone who actually studied the bible and it's actual history knows its a parable.
FYI it's a very tiny number of believers that think the creation is literal.
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never seen anyone so succinctly indicated there lack of understanding what science is.
Newsflash: It doesn't require belief.
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure i'll get modded down for bashing the religious folk. Before you do, re-read it and pretend i was talking about a religion you don't like such as satanism or
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
This to me sounds strangely like religion. Somewhere along the line you have to place trust or belief in something. Nothing is empirical when you're trusting an "authority" on a subject.
The difference is that I can interrogate a scientist and demand his evidence for his beliefs, then draw my own conclusions. When God allows me to interrogate him to prove his existence, then God will be on the same level of trust as scientists.
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:4, Insightful)
You say science doesn't require faith, but it does require a small bit, a belief that past trends are indicative future events. I personally consider this to be a simple obvious truth, and therefore I personally have complete faith in the scientific method. For some reason however not all people share my belief in the scientific method. The rest of the world can ridicule them and laugh at them, but so called "flat earthers" do exist, whether they should or not.
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:2, Insightful)
As an aside, not that statistics actually matter. There are too many ways to bias that final number, and I doubt anyone here would take the time to fully research a poll's methodology.
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, after all, why would you want to spend the time trying to understand the meaning, when you can just make a binary "all myth" or "all fact" choice that completely ignores all the nuance? I mean, it's not like the text itself could possibly contain any hints as to which is which! It's a-priori all or nothing!
I hate people who try to tell others how they should believe in a religion that they themselves don't even believe in or understand. Guess what? You don't get to decide what someone believes. You don't get to call something "picking and choosing" just because you don't grasp the concept that somebody read the book and understood parts of it to be allegory, parts of it literal. You don't get to decide that it is impossible for something to contain both the literal and the figurative, in this case because that's idiotic.
I'm sure i'll get modded down for bashing the religious folk. Before you do, re-read it and pretend i was talking about a religion you don't like such as satanism or
Okay. Stop telling Wiccans what is a valid way to view and practice their religion, you ignorant bigot.
Re:so in some way (Score:4, Insightful)
if it didn't then what's the purpose of staying "alive" for 120000 years?
Some of these bacteria got frozen for 120,000 years. They weren't waiting for it to thaw out; they're just out there living in the cold regions where nothing else can live, and sticking it out even when it gets too cold for them.
Analogously, imagine that there is some primitive tribe of humans with no knowledge of climatology, currently living in tropical or desert climes who, unbeknown to anyone, have a mutation which allows them to survive in hibernation in freezing cold temperatures, and then reawaken when it warms up again. They did not evolve this because they needed to survive freezing cold temperatures, they just have a genetic adaptation which is not disadvantageous, and might even correlate with some other adaptation which is advantageous. And because they live in warm climes, nobody knows they have this mutation.
Then say someday we enter another great ice age, so cold that everybody on Earth dies out, except this tribe, who barely manages to live on for thousands of years, frozen in the ice, due to their mutation. And then eventually the ice age ends and the world gets nice and warm, these people thaw out and start living their lives again.
Now imagine we're aliens watching this future Earth thaw out. We might ask, did these people know that an ice age was coming? No... they've probably never even heard of ice. So they certainly didn't know that the ice age they never expected was going to end eventually. So what's the purpose of them having this mutation that allowed them to stay "alive" frozen in the ice for thousands of years? The answer is that there was none; they didn't mean to have the mutation, and nobody meant for them to have the mutation, they just had it by chance, and as chance would have it it came in really handy when the whole world froze over and everybody but them died out, which is why they're still around for us to wonder about.
Or in short: They didn't get the mutation so that they could survive. They survived because they had the mutation.
This is pathetic (Score:1, Insightful)
And yeah, I'm an AC, so what?
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:so in some way (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Spread your genetic material
2) Don't die.
Re:If it was small enough.. (Score:3, Insightful)
These two cuts will generate significant waste rock or ice. If I were doing this, with normal 1m-long core sections, I'd clean off the saw and table after each section (giving ice shavings in 1m-long bags), then melt each bag separately and "plate" each bag separately. "Plating" is the taking of an innoculum at (various) dilutions into (various different nutrients) petri dishes and/ or culture bottles and incubating. You'd also check the "blank" regularly - plating your dilution saline, etc. It sounds like they plated both the raw melted ice AND melted ice that had been put through a microbial filter and got the same results from both.
Obviously their experimental protocol had been designed to include microbiological sampling, so one can assume that clean-room techniques were in operation further up the material-handling pipeline.
Here's a thought experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
Just be thankful we don't live in the universe where every possible action is a sin.
As to your point about free will and proof, I simply don't understand how you can say that proof and free will are mutually exclusive. Are you saying that proof in mathematics doesn't exist, or that free will doesn't?