www.csua.org/u/saj -> news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110113/sc_livescience/34000yearoldorganismsfoundburiedalive
The bacteria are the tiny, pin-prick-looking objects, dwarfed by the larger, spherical algal cells. The bacteria are the tiny, pin-prick-looking objects, dwarfed ...
com - Thu Jan 13, 11:21 am ET It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange.
Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating - or living - nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.
modern saline lakes, further backing up Schubert's astounding discovery, which was first revealed about a year ago. The new findings, along with details of Schubert's work, are published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today, the publication of the Geological Society of America.
Michael Timofeeff Schubert, now an assistant researcher at the University of Hawaii, said the bacteria - a salt-loving sort still found on Earth today - were shrunken and small, and suspended in a kind of hibernation state. "They're alive, but they're not using any energy to swim around, they're not reproducing," Schubert told OurAmazingPlanet. "They're not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves." The key to the microbes' millennia-long survival may be their fellow captives - algae, of a group called Dunaliella.
exciting part to me was when we were able to identify the Dunaliella cells in there," Schubert said, "because there were hints that could be a food source." With the discovery of a potential energy source trapped alongside the bacteria, it has begun to emerge that, like an outlandish Dr. Seuss invention (hello, Who-ville), these tiny chambers could house entire, microscopic ecosystems.
About a decade ago, there were claims of discoveries of 250-million-year-old bacteria. The results weren't reproduced, and remain controversial. Not only did he grow the same organisms again in his own lab, he sent crystals to another lab, which then got the same results. "So this wasn't something that was just a contaminant from our lab," Schubert said. Survival strategy The next step for researchers is to figure out how the microbes, suspended in a starvation-survival mode for so many thousands of years, managed to stay viable. "They need to be able to repair DNA, because DNA degrades with time." Schubert said the microbes took about two-and-a-half months to "wake up" out of their survival state before they started to reproduce, behavior that has been previously documented in bacteria, and a strategy that certainly makes sense. "It's 34,000 years old and it has a kid," Schubert said. And ironically, once that happens, the new bacteria are, of course, entirely modern. Of the 900 crystal samples Schubert tested, only five produced living bacteria. Most organisms can't be cultured in the lab, so there could be many living microbes that just didn't like their new home enough to reproduce.
com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style.
Report Abuse If this theoretical dating wasn't so misleading it would be laughable. I remember in my previous 1,000 lives somewhere back about a zillion years ago I found a non existent existence. All genuine science will prove out the scriptures and the scriptures verify what was known long before fake science came along.
Maybe you wanna check it out or tell your friends-- --@@Great, but don't tell this to any conservative, apparently they are not concerned with facts nor logic.. It's a really amazing feeling not paying full jacked up prices like the public have-to. I even started selling products to staff at work and I'm making a killing.
it merely provides the best explanations and best approximations addressing the evidence. Newer and better evidence forces the explanations to change. In any event, scientific theories, such as the Theory of Evolution, and the Theory of Gravitation, are backed by evidence that is credible, verifiable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Creation Theory is backed by evidence that is speculative, fictional, make-believe, and wishful-thinking.
Report Abuse scientists continually have to prove that life begins at the single cell level because democraps all think life begins after birth. democraps are the least evolved humans in current times with the simplest minds.
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