Content with the tag: “extremophiles”
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Life's Boiling Point
Some proteins can work above the boiling point of water, but these vital biomolecules may have a harder time evolving at high temperature. A new project is searching for the maximum temperature for protein-based life.
Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]
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"Alien" Water Bears Amaze Scientists
Tardigrades, commonly known as “water bears”, have been reared under laboratory conditions and subjected to a barrage of tests. Their survivability shows that animals can survive extreme conditions, and also may indicate how humans could adapt to the rigors of space.Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]
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Can the Martian Arctic Support Extreme Life?
ABC.com features NASA’s Phoenix lander and the search for life on Mars in a new article on their Technology and Science website. Harkening back to Viking, and citing new discoveries of microbes in Greenland’s glaciers, the article focuses on the need to understand the microbiology of Earth’s extreme environments in order to best search for life on other planets.
Source: [ABC]
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How Low Can Geologists Go?
Scientists have begun the final leg of a five-year, NASA-funded mission to reach the bottom of Cenote Zacatón in Mexico, the world’s deepest known sinkhole.
No one has ever reached bottom and at least one diver has died in the attempt. Scientists want to learn more about Cenote Zacatón’s physical dimensions, the geothermal vents that feed it and the forms of life that exist in its murky depths.
Previous expeditions tested the robotic probe that will make the dive. The Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer, known as DEPTHX, is a tangerine-shaped submarine designed to survey...
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Microbes of the Deep
In this week’s Science, researchers from NAI’s Indiana, Princeton, Tennessee Astrobiology Initiative (IPTAI) and Carnegie Institution of Washington Teams report that they have found an extant microbial biome at 2.8km depth in a South African mine. Analyses showed thermophilic sulfate reducers existing “with no apparent reliance on photosynthetically derived substrates.”
Source: [Link]
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NAI Scientists Successfully Drill into Subglacial Lake
Last month, scientists from NAI’s University of Hawai’i Team, in collaboration with Icelandic research institutes, successfully drilled into and sampled a lake deep beneath a glacier in Iceland. The lake and other subglacial lakes are the focus of studies of life in “extreme environments,” and may resemble potential habitats on Mars and icy satellites in the outer Solar System
Source: [Link]
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Going Deep
Some of the most arresting images of life on our planet have come from the deep-sea world of hydrothermal vents. Massive chimneys belching superheated fluids, colonies of giant crimson-tipped tubeworms swaying in the current, swarms of tiny shrimp, albino crabs. These ecosystems, although isolated from life on the surface, contain a virtual zoo of creatures, thriving under conditions of heat and pressure so extreme that, until the vent communities were discovered in the late 1970s, scientists did not even imagine that they existed.
Perhaps even more fascinating – at least to biologists – has been the cataloging of the microbial...
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