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)
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Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Funny)
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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, Informative)
The Gallup poll [gallup.com] says otherwise. Average of '05, '06, & '07 polls indicated 31% of Americans believed that the bible is the "Actual word of God, to be taken literaly".
~100,000,000 people is not a very tiny number.
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Also, they are provable wrong.
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If you want to tie other religions into it, the number of literal believers is going to go way way up. About 38% of your 4e9 believers are Muslim, and non-heretical Muslims believe the Qur'an (in the original Arabic) to be the literal word of God (as part of the Aqidah). As many of the older Jewish & Christian biblical stories are recounted in the Qur'an, I'd suggest that whether or not you consider 100 million people to be a tiny number, i
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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.
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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, Funny)
Also i could probably prove the DM exists in most D&D campaigns from the characters POV.... though i do like the analogy, it should replace cars on slashdot to represent the world. Nerdier than cars and if anything weird happened we could blame it on gnomes.
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Proving such a negative is essentially impossible (Score:3, Interesting)
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I didn't say t was filled with non-literal stories, I am saying that the creation myth is just that.
There are Many non-literal pieces, but not all of it.
You don't understand interpretations and translation of ancient text.
You don't need to believe all of it. Documentation during that period is poor, at best.
"Thats the exact same as trusting a known liar."
No, it's not. Not even close. You might as well said "Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey."
I am not a believer, but
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It has a certain dada [wikipedia.org] quality.
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Yeah, after all, why would y
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Well that certainly is convenient. I wonder why the bible has so many specific dates if its not literal. Anyways if you read any book that was filled with non-literal stories why would you believe any of it. Thats the exact same as trusting a known liar. If creation is just a metaphor then so is god, jesus and everything else in the bible. Either believe it all or none of it. I hate pick and choose believers. Too cowardly to abandon an ancient book yet too sensible to believe it.
"The Bible" is not a single entity - it is an accumulation of stories gathered over a thousand years or more. Your rant here is no less ignorant than the fundamentalist Evangelicals who think that Baby Jesus gave us the King James Version of the Bible. The creation story very well could be an ancient myth passed down from nomadic tribes 3,500 years ago while a person named Jesus actually lived 2,000 years ago. These are not mutually exclusive.
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
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:5, Insightful)
I have never seen anyone so succinctly indicated there lack of understanding what science is.
Newsflash: It doesn't require belief.
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Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Funny)
Not that it matters, there are plenty of best sellers and classic with bad grammar.
Yes, I know there are others.
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Belief in Occam's razor.
Belief that if things behaved a certain way in the past, they will continue to behave that way in the future.
Of course, everyone (including YEC's) believe in these principles and apply them to their lives all the time (so I guess I am just nitpicking
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This is interesting. Belief just means giving your assent to a proposition.
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:5, Interesting)
You have your chance to ask now.
I ask, but funny enough, nothing happens. I also ask Ra and Zeus to appear, and the identical thing happens.
And you will definitely have your chance in the future.
Should that happen, I will definitely ask him why he set up such a stupid system. If he wanted to be worshipped, he shouldn't have set everything up to appear as though he doesn't exist, and he shouldn't have made religion so absurdly irrational. I'd also probably ask him why, if he's all powerful, why he cares whether we worship him or not. Does it hurt his feelings or something? Or maybe he needs the ego stroke? If I was setting up a universe as my plaything and/or experiment, I'd hardly care about whether the individual pawns are worshipping me. It's kind of like caring whether people in The Sims are aware that a god outside their universe is watching them.
Or maybe that's the point of the experiment -- give people intelligence, sprinkle a few hints early on in ancient history, then put mountains of contrary evidence around, and see how long people take to overcome the early conditioning that God existed.
In fact -- I bet that's it! God will reward those who don't believe in him, because they used the intelligence God gave them to overcome irrationality and the fear instilled by the church. The ones who will be punished are the ones who rejected the intelligence that God gave them. If I was God, that's how I would dole out rewards. And given that God is rational and intelligent (though, the Old Testament kind of argues against both those, but I digress), this is clearly what will happen, should there actually be an afterlife. Better repent your beliefs now, just in case I'm right!
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 mutuall
Re:Young earth creationists (Score:5, Funny)
Addendum to the report (Score:5, Funny)
"This is a great discovery. There is nothing at all to worry about." said the oddly-behaving scientist who discovered the sled dog.
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(later...)
MacReady: [talking into tape recorder] Nobody... nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired... there's nothing more I can do, just wait... RJ MacReady, helico
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Egotistical (Score:2)
Maybe we should introduce this bacteria to the Previously uncontacted Amazon Tribe. [slashdot.org]
120,000?? (Score:4, Funny)
Somebody is lying!
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But what about quality of life (Score:5, Funny)
(Kaaaaahn....)
Re:But what about quality of life (Score:5, Funny)
Ironically, the reason for it melting was due to the scientists using more bore holes than necessary to connect all of the pockets of bacteria cultures in the ice.
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What's Next? (Score:5, Funny)
A) Eager to evolve into an organism capable of having sex.
B) Eager to start posting regularly on Slashdot.
Yes, these options are mutually exclusive.
Oblig. Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Bender: "I was enjoying it until you guys showed up!"
I think you'll be safe (Score:5, Funny)
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Only 120,000 years old? (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, I've got bacteria in my refrigerator that's as old as that.
Hopefully it's harmless (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hopefully it's harmless (Score:5, Funny)
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Extra points if you figure out where this is from.
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Andromeda Spoilers (Score:2)
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I haven't seen the cheesy-looking TV mini-series remake of The Andromeda Strain to see how much they may have fucked up a good movie.
Oh, they fucked it up tonnes. Evidently the original story wasn't good enough, and needed a dose of conspiracy, wormholes, time travel, terrorists, a clumsy out of place and entirely unconnected love scene, a deadly nuclear reactor pool in an unlikely location which seems to warp local physics to allow plot-necessary and otherwise impossible ballistics to succeed.
It gets worse as it goes on; the first half is passable. Watch only to see how much fail Robert Schenkkan [wikipedia.org] can fit into one script.
Achoo! (Score:3, Funny)
Do we ...
(Achoo!)
*sniff*
... have any immunity?
I have to wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
If you put the bacteria into a radioactive, poisonous desert with a rat, a cockroach, Cher and a lawyer, which would survive longest, and would it actually eat the others?
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Disclaimer: people I love are lawyers, but I still find the jokes funny.
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About lawyers...me, too. Some of my best e-mail "customers" for nasty lawyer jokes are lawyers. They often have to deal with the real dickheads that give rise to the stereotypes, and they love to skewer them as much as we do.
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Lets Start Spreading (Score:2)
Lets cultivate this little bug, put in on a nice british-silver-martini ice container, and start sprouting it throughout the solar system and beyond.
By the time they reach Alpha Centauri, we probably will have nuked each other asses and made this rock too hot for anything living.
This way, at least, we know we let some of our "evolutive" life er... "style", out there in the universe for the Flying Sp
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That's probably where it came from in the first place. And you don't need to wrap metal around it, big chunks of ice will do nicely.
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And PSU promptly... (Score:2)
2) Gave them all accounts on PSUVM
3) turned them loose on the internet
Flesh eating bacteria (Score:5, Funny)
I can just see it now...
Breaking news:
Scientists have genetically engineered flesh-eating bacteria that is too small for scientists to detect. Drinking from your faucet is in advised as no filter can filter them out. Symptoms include explosive diarrhea then your eyeballs will fall out.
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As per regular medical verbiage, it should go like this:
"Symptoms include increased stress, mild headaches, upset stomache, an eye tick, itchy skin and vague unusual objects seen out of the corner of your eyes. Some or all of these symptoms may become apparent. After this, the symptoms rapidly move to paranoia and hysteria, followed by a complete collapse of all body tissue. The bacteria can travel through almost any substance, including air and lead."
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John Mccain called ... (Score:5, Funny)
If it was small enough.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, that would be ridiculous.
They probably just studied this one ice core that they had, and found bacteria in it. Which would imply that the ice is simply stuffed with bacteria, so it really wasn't much of an accident at all. Which is hardly surprising, since in our modern world it is nearly impossible to find a surface that isn't replete with bacteria.
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Most likely they were examining part of the core and they "slabbed" it for ease of handling and recording. Core comes out of the ground as cylinders, so all faces are curved, and that makes it hard to examine, measure and photograph (looking for dust bands, flow lines etc). So SOP is to cut the core along a chord (leaving two unequal segments) and then to cut the larger segment into two equal halves. Typically (for rock cores, in the oil industr
120,000 Years Old ?? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:120,000 Years Old ?? (Score:5, Informative)
Depth of ice,number of layers and maybe radiological testing.
Alternate Link With Electron MIcroscopic Image (Score:5, Informative)
Same exact text, but with a picture, from physorg.
http://www.physorg.com/news131712233.html [physorg.com]
Re:Alternate Link With Electron MIcroscopic Image (Score:5, Informative)
which has 3 pictures. For some reason the editor changed it.
Marine Mud (Score:2)
Phoenix (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I do wonder if this has implications for the Mars mission?
so in some way (Score:2)
if it didn't then what's the purpose of staying "alive" for 120000 years?
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.
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1) Spread your genetic material
2) Don't die.
It also seems that so long as goal #1 is being fufilled, #2 doesn't matter so much and can be considered a secondary objective. I predict
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1) Spread your genetic material
2) Don't die.
The real question... (Score:4, Funny)
C'mon... come ooooon... (Score:2, Funny)
120,000 year old Bacteria UnEarthed (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory quote (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Anonymouse Coward (Score:4, Funny)
Science is fixed! (Score:2)
Lucy is found.
Feathered dinosaur fossils found.
Carbon nanotubes discovered.
Soft tissue found in dino thigh bones.
Bacteria thrive in Mars-like environment on Earth.
Now, I'm probably just receiving the news out of order, but the "X might be true - Voila X
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several things (Score:2)
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