Lake Vostok Found Teeming With Life 62
jpyeck writes "Lake Vostok, Antarctica's biggest and deepest subsurface lake, might contain thousands of different kinds of tiny organisms — and perhaps bigger fish as well, researchers report. The lake, buried under more than 2 miles (3.7 kilometers) of Antarctic ice, has been seen as an earthly analog for ice-covered seas on such worlds as Europa and Enceladus. It's thought to have been cut off from the outside world for as long as 15 million years. But the latest results, reported in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that the lake isn't as sterile or otherworldly as some scientists might have thought. More than 3,500 different DNA sequences were identified in samples extracted from layers of ice that have built up just above the surface of the lake."
Are any of them potentially dangerous? (Score:5, Funny)
They should get one of the clipboard guys to chug a bottle and see if he mutates.
Re:Are any of them potentially dangerous? (Score:5, Funny)
Screw dangerous, I'm wondering how those fish *taste*.
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Screw dangerous, I'm wondering how those fish *taste*.
Old.
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Or really, really needs some Chapstick.
Don't dig up the spaceship (Score:5, Funny)
That ends badly
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You can't handle the tooth.
Mountains Of Madness (Score:2)
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After all the fuss (Score:5, Funny)
...it turns out to be life as we know it
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Should've RTFA, they did exactly that.
It's not contamination (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not contamination (Score:4, Insightful)
I've read TFA, and thanks for adding some clarity, but I still have to wonder when they'll sequence the DNA.
Apparently you neither read the TFA nor the reply to your original false assertion that they didn't sequence the DNA.
Nor does your claim "if it's just an already known species then it's just contamination" make any sense.
I was on a remote island recently. I picked up an odd feather on the beach. I brought it back home and used it to identify the bird it came from. It was a known species.
There is absolutely no basis in that observation to support the claim that my backpack had somehow become contaminated by feathers from that species, and DNA is no different from feathers in this regard, when subject to ordinary standards of careful handling for such samples, which were obviously applied in this case (that is: the people doing the research are not and should not be presumed to be complete idiots.)
So you're completely wrong about all that, but have a nice day anyway!
If it were my pool... (Score:3)
...I'd shock it with a giant does of chlorine.
Drop a few kilos of explosives down the chute (Score:4, Funny)
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The hole is so deep, any water rising freezes against the ice walls, and caps it off.
Clean water? (Score:2)
So where am I supposed to get clean water for my scotch?
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You can buy a jug of distilled water at virtually any grocery store in the country.
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So where am I supposed to get clean water for my scotch?
Mandrake, I suggest you drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol.
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So where am I supposed to get clean water for my scotch?
You're not. Not, that is, if you like scotch.
bigger fish (Score:3)
There is probably a civilization of super piranha, that have been surviving by cannibalism for 15 million years, creating a race of super big, super powerful, mean, man eating monsters.
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to be fair to the fish: if they're cannibals, then they're not man-eating monsters.
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Cannibal is not like vegetarian, it is not exclusive.
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I saw a documentary on Encore last year. They have a hankering for bouncing women in bikinis.
Re:bigger jaws (Score:1)
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I'm fairly sure that the GP was making a reference to the sci-fi novel "The Legacy of Heorot" by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. Specifically, the life cycle of "Grendels".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot [wikipedia.org]
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I'd be just as interested to find the men down there they've been eating...
"More than" (Score:2, Insightful)
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You've written more than enough.
Re:"More than" (Score:5, Informative)
The exact number is 3,507. I hope you're now able to sleep well at night.
...and if you're curious, that number is actually extremely low by the standards for this type of experiment; they didn't analyse anywhere near enough data. Metagenomics is supposed to take up gigabytes of disk space; the amount of usable data they got was around 37 MB.
Not remotely an analog (Score:2)
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So all frozen and liquid water was exactly the same for billions of years on Earth and it's impossible for any single celled organisms to have snuck in at any given time due to freezing, unfreezing, and water moving? Wow, amazing! What a self-contained astronomical quarantine!
There's a figure in the NBC article showing how the liquid lake water freezes onto the bottom of the ice sheet. The label is "accretion ice". If that is what you're ranting about. It's hard to be sure.
Quoting Jeff Goldblum (Score:2)
Life...hmm...uh...will...uh...find a way.
Have they found .... (Score:2)
Contamination is a bitch (Score:2, Interesting)
I do metagenomics in a Deep Biosphere project and have to wonder how this article even got published. I mean, 80% contamination rate is just insane. We've been plagued by contamination as well (1-3% that I can tell). Sure, it's easy to filter out e.g. human sequences from the data, but what about the 1,000 or so bacterial species that live on the human skin? They conveniently skip this part in the article..
Simple, really (Score:1)
Go 'Tards (Score:1)
[...], a tardigrade (closest to Milnesium sp., a hardy, predatory, cosmopolitan, freshwater species; 93% identity) [...]
Outer space, inside of an electron microscope, under a million-year-old ice sheet, whatever. Water bear don't care.