Ancient Lava Caves in Hawai'i Are Teeming With Mysterious Life Forms (sciencealert.com) 35
Microbes are the smallest known living organisms on Earth and can be found just about everywhere, even in the cold, Mars-like conditions of lava caves. From a report: On the island of Hawai'i, scientists recently found a marvelous assortment of novel microbes thriving in geothermal caves, lava tubes, and volcanic vents. These underground structures were formed 65 and 800 years ago and receive little to no sunlight. They can also harbor toxic minerals and gases. Yet microbial mats are a common feature of Hawai'ian lava caves. Samples of these mats, taken between 2006 and 2009 and then again between 2017 and 2019, reveal even more unique life forms than expected. When researchers sequenced 70 samples for a single RNA gene, commonly used for identifying microbial diversity and abundance, they could not match any results to known genuses or species, at least not with high confidence.
"This suggests that caves and fumaroles are under-explored diverse ecosystems," write the study's authors. e biomass in Earth's deep subsurface. Yet because these organisms are so tiny and live in such extreme environments, scientists have historically overlooked them. In recent years, underground microbes have received more interest because they exist in environments very similar to those found on Mars. But there's still a long way to go. Recent estimates suggest 99.999 percent of all microbe species remain unknown, leading some to refer to them as "dark matter." The new research from Hawai'i underscores just how obscure these life forms are.
"This suggests that caves and fumaroles are under-explored diverse ecosystems," write the study's authors. e biomass in Earth's deep subsurface. Yet because these organisms are so tiny and live in such extreme environments, scientists have historically overlooked them. In recent years, underground microbes have received more interest because they exist in environments very similar to those found on Mars. But there's still a long way to go. Recent estimates suggest 99.999 percent of all microbe species remain unknown, leading some to refer to them as "dark matter." The new research from Hawai'i underscores just how obscure these life forms are.
Please, until the pandemic is over (Score:2, Funny)
Dont. Touch. New. Critters.
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There was a brief period when COVID was an unknown, but COVID was never a real threat:
- 99.97% survival rate
- Peak COVID 2020/2021 the #1 killer was heart disease and the #2 was cancer
- Peak COVID 2020/2021 deaths due to COVID accounted for 1 in 10 deaths (9 in 10 were other causes)
- Wearing masks in public had little to no impact
- Isolation had little positive impact
- You can NEVER get rid of COVID in humans because it exists in reservoir animals
"It's a fairly low fatality rate and it's a disease mainly of
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Unlike you.
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Dont. Touch. New. Critters.
If people took that advice, a lot of science fiction films would be a lot shorter.
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"It totally absorbed the old man!"
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> "It totally absorbed the old man!"
Why is it always an old dude? Munch an old lady for once. Gender equality = munch boobs also.
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But the idea of a pathogen that we don't get from bats would be so exciting.
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Maybe not-interacting with bats or any other form of wildlife would be a good idea. But people don't seem to be willing to do that. Our environments overlap, for a start.
Watch your tounge. (Score:2)
I for one, welcome our new microbial overlords.
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If success was measured in sheer mass, microbes have been the overlords for billions of years. Multicellular organisms are just interlopers in their vast realm, tolerated, well, except when the microbes get a taste for them that is.
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If success was measured in sheer mass, microbes have been the overlords for billions of years. Multicellular organisms are just interlopers in their vast realm, tolerated, well, except when the microbes get a taste for them that is.
Says the transport mechanism for microflora.
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To quote Jeff Goldblum, life will find a way. It seems no matter how toxic the environment on, above or in the crust of Earth, there's some organism that can make a living.
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I contain multitides (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm reading a book entitled "I Contain Multitudes" that talks at length about the vast proliferation of microbes in the ecosphere and in your own body. An excellent read. It would not surprise me at all if microbes are found in the subsurface of Mars and moons of the outer planets.
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It's important that you made that important qualification : "the subsurface". Most people seem to think that "near surface" means "easy to get to. The important point about the subsurface being, of course, that you can't see into the subsurface without drilling a hole from the surface to there (or dynamiting ; pick a hole-making technology). The first attempt at making significant penetration into a
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Years ago I saw a proposal that I thought interesting, a surface lander would separate into two parts. One part stayed on the surface to provide communications, the other was a hot RTG that would melt its way through the ice, paying out a fiber optic cable as it descended. The ice would of course would refreeze behind it, encasing any sensors that the descent unit would leave behind. I never saw any criticism against the idea, but I've never heard any further discussion of it either so there may be some
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The RTG isn't an "invention" problem. Nor are the sensors, or surface station (I'll come back to it's power). The big problem is linking them. Which uses an "umbilical".
Let's get one thing out of the way - "wireless" rapidly gets unworkable.
- A few tens of metres ; plausible. We did have a tool for collecting data from the drill bit (it's mounting sub, actually ; the "drill bits" are disposable - "dumb iron" in the trade), past a joint rotating at
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Thanks for that. I'm pretty sure the spool would have to reside on the decender, I've tried to pull a wire out of half a meter of ice and failed.
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Which places some major constraints on the dimensions of the cable, and therefore it's strength.
Dad picked up a couple of rolls of stainless steel wire from work a when I was a kid - I suspect from a long duration "wire recorder" cousin of a tape recorder, but I never bothered to ask. 7km of wire on a spool weighing about a kilogramme. Quite spacecraft-friendly. But ... It has a tensile strength of a only about a kilogramme - you could barely pick up the spool by the thread it carried, and you had
I've seen something like this before (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I assume someone is virtue-signaling here. It;s Hawaii.
English people call Spain "Spain", not España - unless you're so far up your own backside that you can peer though the gap in your front teeth.
Actually, it's not at all uncommon to see people in America put the tilde in borrowed Spanish words like "pinata" or "senor".
Just like there are plenty of American English people who include the umlaut when they write "Schrodinger". That usually just means they enjoy being a little more precise, or they enjoy getting to use a cool diacritic mark their native language doesn't have. It's not virtue-signalers out there worrying about cultural sensitivity to Germanic peoples.
Putting the okina in the proper noun
Perhaps Quarantine Workers For a Few Days... (Score:2)
Prokaryote ribosomal RNA (Score:5, Informative)
Here is some background on what is going on ...
Basically, ribosomes are the protein factories in all living cells, and without it, there is no life. Even a virus has to commandeer the ribosomes of a living cell to replicate itself.
Each ribosome is composed of two segments, one larger than the other. The segments are RNA strands interwoven with protein strands. This is kind of peculiar, since almost everything else in the cell machinery requires protein alone. But here, RNA is acting as a catalyst/enzyme, and not genetic storage.
Eukaryotes (animals, plants and fungi) have their unique ribosomal units, coded for by specific genes, while prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) have also two units, but different than the former.
Here, they are scanning for the gene that codes for the 16S ribosomal RNA [wikipedia.org] (hence rRNA), and they did not get a match.
So there are interesting organisms in there. This will lead to new information that will fill in the gaps within the tree of life that we know.
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They use the 18S ribosome's RNA too, for peering deep into the pre-eukaryote tree of life. In theory you should get the same phylogenetic result, unless the two ribosomes originated in otherwise unrelated organisms, and got into "LUCA" (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) by horizontal gene transfer between otherwise unrelated organisms.
There's a reason that the "ori
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Yeah, there could be other branches of life that went extinct. Almost certain that there are extinct branches, specially when bacteria/archea existed for billions of years as the only forms of life on earth.
The question is, as you say, whether there were multiple branches and one outcompeted them, with or without horizontal gene transfer.
What I find interesting is that if there was an RNA world, the ribosome, as well as the various other RNAs necessary for life (mRNA, tRNA, ...) are remnants from the RNA wo
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My bet would be on non-survival.