Tag Archives: life

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The lone survivor: single organism ecosystem discovered

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Scientists has discovered a new bacterial organism called desulforudis audaxviator that is an entirely self-sufficient ecosystem in and of itself, 2.8 km below the Earth’s surface the desulforudis audaxviator’s genome contains:

…everything needed for the organism to sustain an independent existence and reproduce, including the ability to incorporate the elements necessary for life from inorganic sources, move freely, and protect itself from viruses, harsh conditions, and nutrient-poor periods by becoming a spore.

This is a beautiful discovery, and a testament to the diversity and splendour of Life. Also, it suggests there is no theoretical reason why life cannot survive in similar conditions on other planets:

“One question that has arisen when considering the capacity of other planets to support life is whether organisms can exist independently, without access even to the sun,” says Chivian. “The answer is yes, and here’s the proof. It’s sort of philosophically exciting to know that everything necessary for life can be packed into a single genome.”

[image from eschipul on flickr]

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Multitasking: You can’t do it, my friends

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babbage

It might seem like a strange thing to say, coming from a person who’s drinking coffee, answering office email, listening to Juliana Hatfield’s great new album How to Walk Away which I really recommend, and blogging, but multitasking is just about impossible, according to MRI experiments.

…[A] man lying inside the scanner would be performing different tasks, depending on the color of two numbers he sees on a screen. … [W[hen the man in the scanner sees green, his brain has to pause before responding — to round up all the information it has about the green task. When the man sees red, his brain pauses again — to push aside information about the green task and replace it with information about the red task. If the tasks were simpler, they might not require this sort of full-throttle switching. But, [U. Michigan neuroscientist Daniel] Weissman said, even simple tasks can overwhelm the brain when we try to do several at once.

Modern life expects us to do more and more things more quickly, if not simultaneously. If that’s not even possible, at what point do we reorder our tasks and expectations? How will your Bartleby-like character cope?

[Charles Babbage’s brain by Gaetan Lee]

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Water on Mars? Yup. Life? Naaaaah… or, well, perhaps.

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NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander - artist's impressionOK, so we’re pretty positive about there being water on Mars now, but if you thought all was certainty in the realms of planetary exploration, you’d be wrong wrong wrong. [image courtesy NASA]

It’s all Aviation Week‘s fault, after they ran a story claiming that the White House had just been…

“… alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the “potential for life” on Mars”.

As delightfully ambiguous as any pre-press-release announcement… and unsurprisingly (perhaps even as planned?) home-brew speculationists have been clogging the intertubes with theories about what NASA is (or was, or wasn’t) planning to announce.

So far, so unsurprising. Until you discover that the Phoenix lander itself* has announced that it definitely hasn’t discovered life and that there has been no such White House briefing. What gives?

Personally I suspect nothing more than the results of old-school media briefings and funky new methods (social-media-ZOMG!) getting a bit out of sync, but why spoil a potentially good conspiracy theory, eh? If you really want to burst that irrational bubble, Karl Schroeder has a pretty plausible explanation of what’s probably going on.

The recent discovery that the soil at the Phoenix lander site could support some earthly plants would appear to contradict the findings of the Viking landers from the 1970s. Those craft deployed sophisticated experiments to determine whether life is present on Mars, yet the instruments returned ambiguous results. There was a strong signal indicating life from some of the instruments, yet no evidence of biological material in the soil. The official interpretation that has become orthodoxy as a result, is that the Martian soil is highly oxidizing, ie. that it contains compounds such as hydrogen peroxide that destroy biological materials.

But if Phoenix has found that you could grow earthly plants in the soil at its site, doesn’t this cast serious doubt on that interpretation?

So, not so much “discovering life” as “possibly refuting a speculative negative interpretation of positive results gathered decades ago in support of the possibility of life”… but it doesn’t take a degree in journalism to see which of those two makes the better headline, AMIRITE?

[ * – Well, someone on the team, but you know what I mean. ]

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Mars has component minerals for life

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NASA\'s Mars Phoenix Lander - artist\'s impressionLatest word from the Phoenix Lander suggests that the soil of Mars contains the right sort of minerals to support certain forms of plant life – apparently asparagus would thrive there. I now have visions of an Edgar Rice Burroughs chase scene set in a forest of towering asparagus … [image courtesy NASA]

Of course, if you listen to a certain irritatingly vocal minority of asshats, we shouldn’t be wasting our time and taxes searching for the origin of life on other planets because “[l]ife originated on Earth when God spoke it into existence“. O RLY?

I think I’ve reached a tipping point with creationists; I used to find them infuriating, but recently I’ve found I just pity them. If the glory of God serves only to blind you to the glory of the universe, life must be depressingly short on moments of genuine marvel.

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Mars Water Fit for Pickling . . . Life

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toxic waterThe scientific community eagerly watches the progress as Pheonix lander scours Mars. They are hoping that there will be signs that there was once a supply of water on the planet that would give evidence that there may have once been life on the planet. Most scientists seem to conclude, though, that data from the Opportunity indicates that the water was a toxic mix of salty water and minerals that would have been unsuitable for Earth-like lifeforms. [photo courtesy Kevin].

If this is true, then it changes a lot of our views of the Red Planet, making it a lot less viable as a possible location for colonies or population in the future. What was once seen as the new bastion of human existence when we ruin the planet we have now, may be nothing more than a dusty satellite orbiting the Sun. Who’s to say, though? We on Earth have such an egocentric view of our existence that it’s hard for us to imagine that there may be other possibilities of variant lifeforms in the universe that don’t operate as we do (i.e. – do all lifeforms really have to be carbon-based?).