Thermal vents in Lake Vostok?

[Dead_Parrot]

Now this is just plain weird.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4861170.stm

Researchers have found traces of a heat-loving bacterium that may live beneath a frozen lake in Antarctica.

Lake Vostok is covered by more than 3km of ice and must have been isolated from our planet's atmosphere for millions of years.

The bacteria appeared in sediment mixed with a core of ice drilled by Russian and French researchers.

The heat-loving, or thermophilic, bacterium may suggest that hydrothermal vents exist on the lake floor.

I hate BBC paragraphs.

[Canuckistanian]

1. It's not that weird

They've found anaerobic bacteria (no oxygen) on the seabed around thermal vents, bacteria growing in nuclear reactors and bacteria that survive in Antarctic ice.

To me this is just one more example of how life adapts to a wider number of environments than we thought.

It wouldn't surprise me to find such life on other planets when we get there.

[Sal Minella]

2. Wasn't there a nitrogen-based (instead of carbon-based) "bacteria"

found near Africa in the last couple years? The endless adaptability is mind-boggling.

[Canuckistanian]

4. Never heard that

You sure it wasn't nitrogen-breathing? I'm unaware of any non-carbon based life.

[Sal Minella]

6. This was a couple years ago or so -- I "remember" nitrogen-based,

but like Mark Twain I remember thousands of things that never happened.

I didn't take that much notice of it at the time because I thought anything so far out of the scientific mainstream would be covered in the popular press, but I never saw anything more about it. Will go try Google just for the heck of it.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Interesting Wiki...

I also hit google for it (with no luck yet), but found a wiki on alt. biochem. which makes for a facinating read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_biochemistry

[Canuckistanian]

8. Thanks - proves my point

"Up to this point, however, no non-carbon based life-form has been discovered."

[Sal Minella]

10. ooops. got reply in wrong place. Found nothing in Google.

Wonder what the heck it was that I'm remembering. Wish I'd paid more attention, but I was so sure it would appear someplace like Scientific American.

[Canuckistanian]

11. Still, interesting Wiki on possible alternative life

I remember a Star Trek episode on silicon-based life - basically living rocks. They healed one of the injured aliens with mortar and a trowel!

[Sal Minella]

9. Googling nitrogen-based bacteria brought no returns (lots of

nitrogen-fixing going on in that world, though!) My eyes are tired, have to go do something else for awhile.

[kestrel91316]

12. It probably was a Nitrobacter (nitrogen-reducing) type of bug.............

Or Nitrosomonas.

They are carbon-based. But they "eat" nitrous stuff.

[newswolf56]

3. Given the ubiquity of life, the movie 'Alien' was not so far-fetched...

after all. It's entirely possible you could have genuine monsters (probably exoskeletal creatures: equivalents of giant scorpions or 20-foot centipedes) on plants with methane or ammonia atmospheres. Don't much think I'd want to dare a swim in a Jovian sea, either...

But in truth we'll never know. The collapse of the petroleum economy means that space travel is now and forever nothing more than an impossible dream -- that even the days of flight (save perhaps by Zeppelin) are numbered: the petro-economy was our one chance to fly, and our failure to develop alternative fuels and engines -- the direct result of a global economy run exclusively for the fulfillment of obscene capitalist greed rather than in keeping with sound environmental and humanitarian principles (and the socialist systems mandated thereby) -- has now doomed us to be nothing more than a Third World planet for all eternity.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. You don't need to go that far...

LONDON, Nov 30 (Reuters) - Tracks made 330 million years ago by a six-legged water scorpion bigger than a human have been found in Scotland.

Martin Whyte, the geologist at the University of Sheffield in northern England who discovered the tracks, said on Wednesday they were left by a scorpion that measured 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 inches) in length and one metre across.

Discussion at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=228&topic_id=15576