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Bacterial bail-out for Deepwater methane

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Well, that’s one less thing to worry about. The Deepwater Horizon oil-well crisis released a whole lot of hydrocarbons into the environment, the most obvious (and destructive) of which was the oil itself. A whole lot of methane got out too, which was something of a worry; we’ve more than enough greenhouse gases to be going on with as it is. But the bulk of the methane released – assuming the estimates of volume were right, anyway – appears to have been eaten up by ocean-going microbes:

Methane is thought to account for 30% by weight of the output from BP’s blown-out well, and was a major component of a vast plume of oil and gas that formed about 1,000 metres deep.

However, contrary to the expectations of the lead researcher in the new study, John Kessler, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University, that the methane would linger for years, nearly all of the gas was consumed by microbes within 120 days of the blow-out.

By the time Kessler and his team returned for the second of their three research missions to the Gulf on 18 August, the methane had been scrubbed.

“All of that evidence had pointed to a much longer lifetime of methane in deepwater plumes with a lifespan possibly as long as years,” he said. “It was quite surprising.”

Readings on methane and oxygen levels at 207 stations indicated a massive “bloom” of methane-eating underwater bacteria sometime between the end of June and the beginning of August. “It likely occurred after affected waters had flowed away from the wellhead,” the study said.

A silver lining to a decidedly dark cloud, there. Someone should get to researching those little beasties quickly; it’d be nice to have some sort of tool to deal with the potential planetary-scale farting that melting permafrost might produce. And who knows – with a bit of bioengineering, perhaps they could be made to convert that methane into something useful.

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More molecules: perchlorates on Mars

It’s just like buses; you wait for ages, and then two life-molecules-in-space stories come along at once. This one’s a little closer to home than the Saturnian subsystem, though; a discovery by the Phoenix rover in 2008 encouraged scientists to re-evaluate some old Viking data:

Phoenix detected a chlorine-containing chemical called perchlorate at its landing site, near the Martian north pole. The researchers suspected that perchlorate may have produced what Viking found, destroying original soil organics and leaving behind the two chlorinated compounds, chloromethane and dichloromethane.

So the scientists performed a lab experiment. They grabbed some dirt from Chile’s Atacama Desert — widely considered to be a Martian analog environment — and spiked it with perchlorate. Then they heated the mixture up in the lab, just as the Viking landers did on Mars.

Just as with Viking, the researchers found chloromethane and dichloromethane.

“The simplest, most reasonable explanation of the Viking results is that there were organics in the soil, and they were consumed by the perchlorate,” McKay said. “I think it’s pretty convincing.”

Don’t get too excited, though:

The results don’t prove that life exists — or ever existed — on Mars. While organics are associated with life here on Earth, that’s not necessarily the case elsewhere in the solar system, McKay said.

[…]

But the prospect of Martian life may be a bit more likely now, since Viking seemingly found life’s building blocks in the planet’s red dirt more than three decades ago.

Said it before, and I’ll say it again – let’s just go there, properly, and find out for real.

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Nucleotides in Titan’s atmosphere?

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I’m somewhat surprised that I haven’t seen this story all over the place. Perhaps everyone’s taking a while to get back up to speed after the holidays… or perhaps no one wants to get burned the same way they were by the last story about life chemistry that came out of NASA’s press department.

Nonetheless, complete with obligatory “maybe real life is stranger than science fiction after all OMGZ!!” closer, here’s NASA Science News talking about an experiment that demonstrates the possibility of basic life chemistry building blocks in the atmosphere of the Saturnian moon, Titan:

Hörst and her colleagues mixed up a brew of molecules (carbon monoxide(1), molecular nitrogen and methane) found in Titan’s atmosphere. Then they zapped the concoction with radio waves – a proxy for the sun’s radiation.

What happened next didn’t make the scientists shout “it’s alive!” but it was intriguing.

[ There’s good reason to make science journalism accessible, but do we really need shitty little asides like that, NASA? This isn’t Sesame Street, for goodness’ sake… ]

A rich array of complex molecules emerged, including amino acids and nucleotides.

“Our experiment is the first proof that you can make the precursors for life up in an atmosphere, without any liquid water(2). This means life’s building blocks could form in the air and then rain down from the skies!”

[ The metal-head in me now really wants to use Slayer’s “Reign In Blood” as a voice-over bed for this article. Sing along at home! ]

“We didn’t start out to prove we could make ‘life’ in Titan’s skies,” explains Hörst. “We were trying to solve a mystery. The Cassini spacecraft detected large molecules(3) in Titan’s atmosphere, and we wanted to find out what they could be.”

In hopes of obtaining clues to the mystery molecules, Hörst used computer codes to search the lab results for matches to known molecular formulas. She decided, on a whim, to look for nucleotides and amino acids.

[…]

“We had about 5000 molecules containing the right stuff: carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. We knew we had the elements for organic molecules, but we couldn’t tell how they were arranged. It’s kind of like legos – the more there are, the more possible structures can be made. And they can be put together in many different ways.”

Among the structures identified in the lab experiment so far are five nucleotides found in DNA and RNA, and two amino acids. But she says there could be more amino acids in the mix.

How could those molecules have gotten there? The ice geysers of Enceladus are a possible answer, apparently, though this is all strictly speculative stuff at this point.

Search-for-alien-life bonus material! Antarctica’s massive Lake Vostok may finally give up its secrets (presuming it has any, natch) now that a Russian team has come up with a way to sample the lake’s water without contaminating its effectively closed ecosystem with dirty surface-monkey germs. What mysterious things might we discover lurking miles beneath the ice? Whatever’s down there, it might give us some more clues to what’s going on on Enceladus…

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Goldfacebookman: bubblenomics ahoy!

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So, Goldman Sachs is investing in Facebook. Lots of furore in the media: Facebook’s worth US$50billion, you know! Well, given recent events, I’m not sure I’d trust Goldman Sachs to accurately value anything other than their own scaly skin, but there you go. My cynicism is largely uninformed and instinctive, but smarter folk than I are looking beyond the gloss:

… you can look at the economics and note that Goldmans is buying under 1% of an illiquid stock, thus valuing the whole 100% at $50bn, and that to justify such a valuation at maturity (at say c 5x revenue valuation, like Google) would imply revenues of $10billion. Given that it already claims c 500m users (1/8th of the world’s online population, because as we know, there are no false accounts on Facebook) it is hard to believe much more than a doubling of users, so say 1 billion users. So, $10 bn over 1 bn users is $10 per user per annum (vs c $4 today), or say $1 / month. Sounds possible, except you have to remember that many users hardly use the system, and social media ads tend to have CPM in the fractions of pennies, so you are having to believe they can ship hundreds of thousands of Ads to each person each month, or can sell online goods – ie demi-freemium funding – but that typically only attracts c 5% of users, so you are looking at $20 per month per paying instead.

My take – Don is right, the good assets are expensive, but $50bn is a valuation based on a microstake. Goldman Sachs are not fools, but this is basic bubblenomics – and bubbles are built on the Bigger Fool Theory, ie there will be bigger fools who will buy these shares from Goldman. When you see private Facebook shares being sold to the “Man on the Street” its time to run for the hills.

Here’s the kicker:

The one sure thing you can tell from this is that Facebook clearly can’t self fund itself enough for what it needs, even on $2bn turnover a year.

And here rephrased by Ian Betteridge:

A web site which has 500 million users, 1/8th of the entire population of the Internet, doesn’t have a business model capable of supporting itself.

Ouch. More interesting still is that Goldman are inventing some brand new voodoo finance stunts specifically for this gig:

What Goldman Sachs is proposing to do is create a $1.5 billion, so-called “special-purpose vehicle” — a term that could only have been conjured on Wall Street — that would allow its high-net-worth clients to invest in Facebook.

The participants in Goldman’s Facebook “special-purpose vehicle” would not be considered Facebook owners “of record,” but rather “beneficial” owners. In other words, for the purposes of the Securities Exchange Act, Goldman’s Facebook “special-purpose vehicle” would constitute one owner “of record,” no matter how many Goldman clients participate.

Thus, it would appear that Goldman Sachs and Facebook are attempting to avoid SEC disclosure rules and allow Facebook to remain private for as long as possible, but still make it easy for Goldman’s rich clients to invest in the company.

The SEC is apparently keeping an eye on things, but you’ll forgive me, I hope, for not taking that as an assurance that some seriously shady shit won’t go down anyway. Are our memories really so short? Ooooh, look – shiny!

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Rushkoff: abandon internet, build its successor

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Over at Shareable, Doug Rushkoff crystallises a bunch of post-Wikileaks thoughts that have been knocking around in my head into one (fairly) coherent statement:

… the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks, relays, and ISPs. That’s why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was “no threat.”

I’m not trying to be a downer here, or knock the possibilities for networking. I just want to smash the fiction that the Internet is some sort of uncontrollable, decentralized free-for-all, so that we can get on with the business of creating something else that is.

That “something else” is basically a peer-to-peer network similar to the existing internet, but one that is completely unreliant on corporate/gubernatorial/non-commons infrastructure like optical fibre. Rushkoff is honest enough to admit he doesn’t have the answers, but he’s surely asking the right questions:

Shall we use telephony, ham radio, or some other part of the spectrum? Do we organize overlapping meshes of WiMax? Do we ask George Soros for some money? MacArthur Foundation? Do we even need or want them or money at all? How might the funding of our network by a central bank issued currency, or a private foundation, or a public university, bias the very architecture we are trying to build? Who gets the ability to govern or limit what may spread over our network, if anyone? Should there be ways for us to transact?

To make the sorts of choices that might actually yield our next and truly decentralized network, we must take a good look at the highly centralized real world in which we live – as well as how it got that way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the forces at play, and accepting the battles we have already lost, might we begin to forge ahead to create new forms that exist beyond any authority’s ability to grant them protection.

I’m no network engineer, but I’m pretty sure that an ad-hoc and rhizomatic peer-to-peer network based on some cableless connection like wi-fi is possible, at least in theory. Anyone in the audience able to tell me why I’m wrong? Or, better still, how we can build it?

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