Stories tagged life
Researchers at Penn State have found a new species of bacteria in Greenland. Big whip – as long as it stays away from me, who cares? Well, this organism is ultra-small (I know what you’re thinking – aren’t bacteria pretty, um, small to begin with? Yeah, but these are super-duper small). It has also survived for 120 thousand years trapped without oxygen under two miles of ice. It may help scientists look for life on cold planets and moons elsewhere in our Solar System. (Which I think is a proper noun and therefore should be capitalized, though I may be mistaken.)
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Where are you going?: I'm going home.
Courtesy MilaNew tests performed on a meteorite found in Australia suggest that life on earth could have had its start in space; it’s possible that the first components of self-replicating genetic material came from outer space.
This particular meteorite only struck Earth about 40 years ago, but new studies confirm that the molecules uracil and xanthine (which are found in our RNA) were present in the meteoritic fragments before human contamination.
Uracil and xanthine are “nucleobases,” and play an important role in the replication of DNA. Some have argued that these molecules could have originally formed on Earth, but these researchers claim that the atmospheric conditions on the planet at the time the first organic molecules are thought to have appeared would have prohibited a terrestrial origin. Going even further, they state that it’s possible—assuming that there are all these vital molecules floating out there on meteors—that life, or at least the key components for life (a big difference I suppose), could be widespread in the universe.
I prefer extraterrestrial life delivery by spaceship, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. Wild.
Is anybody out there?: If not, it'd be fine by me!
Courtesy NASA
Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? That’s a hot topic, both among astronomers and right here on Science Buzz. The argument goes like this:
• There are about 100 billion galaxies in the known Universe
• Each galaxy has about 100 billion stars.
• Even if only a small fraction of them have planets, that’s still an awful lot. Ya gotta figure at least some of them developed intelligent life.
And thus we go looking for signs of life in outer space: probes to Mars, searches for organic molecules, even scanning the skies for radio signals. So far… nothing.
Nick Bostrom is glad. This Oxford professor argues that finding life on other planets would be bad news for us here on Earth.
The way he sees it is this:
• The Universe is about 14.5 billion years old.
• Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
• That’s plenty of time for intelligent life anywhere else in our galaxy, or even a nearby galaxy, to come pay a visit.
• They haven’t.
This convinces Bostrom that interstellar travel must be impossible – if it wasn’t, someone would have stopped in by now, if only to ask for directions.
What makes interstellar travel impossible? Bostrom and economist Robin Hanson theorize (or “theorise” – they are British, after all) the existence of one or more “Great Filters.” The evolution of life, from primordial ooze to galactic explorer, requires a vast number of steps, some so complicated as to be virtually impossible. Obviously, one of those steps has been preventing interstellar travel for the past 14.5 billion years, so it must be pretty good.
What does all this have to do with life here on Earth? Simply this: the identity of this filter, and whether it lies ahead of us or behind us, may very well determine the fate of all humanity.
If the filter lies behind us—especially if the filter lies wayyyy behind us—then we’re in good shape. We’ve passed the barrier that has stopped everybody else. But if the filter lies close to us—or, worse yet, ahead of us—then it spells big trouble. For example, perhaps the only way to travel the stars is to harness some great energy source: nuclear power, or perhaps something we haven’t discovered yet. And perhaps every civilization in the history of the Universe that discovered this power ended up blowing themselves up. It’s unlikely that we would be any different.
Bostrom’s conclusion is counter-intuitive but compelling. If, as we explore the Universe, we find life is rare, then that’s good news—Earth succeeded where every other planet failed. But if we find that life, especially complex, intelligent life, is common, then that doesn’t bode well at all. Whatever stopped those planets is likely going to stop us, too.
*(PS: The answer is, Tommy James and the Shondells, later covered by Tiffany -- both proof that intelligent life is exceedingly rare, even here on Earth.)
Two future fathers compare their progress: Hey! They should be in a bar!
Courtesy $4 grizOne Thomas Beatie of Bend, Oregon, claims to be five months pregnant with a baby girl.
A pregnant man… so strange… and yet so familiar. Where have I seen this before?
Oh, wait, I know exactly where I’ve seen this before: for the second time in as many months, Hollywood has beaten the rest of us saps to the scientific punch. And not just Hollywood, but the Terminator himself. First it was the thing with the twins, a so called scientific breakthrough that we had nonetheless seen 20 years ago in the film
Twins, and now we’re being told that a pregnant man is something to get all excited about, when we’ve all already known about this kind of thing since 1994 and the film (that is to say, documentary) Junior, where a matronly Arnold Schwarzenegger frets over the impending catastrophic damage to his male urethra (this wasn’t explicit in the movie, as far as I know, but we all know Arnold is too tough for a cesarean—check out Predator—and there aren’t a lot of other options for a pregnant man).
As redundant as it may be to give them attention, here are the details of the current male pregnancy: Normal guy Thomas Beatie and his wife have been together for 10 years, and had long hoped to start a family. Sadly, Nancy Beatie had had a hysterectomy, and was unable to conceive. Thinking outside the box, the Beaties decided then to switch things up a little bit, and Thomas took up the pregnancy flag himself. This would have been particularly tricky, if not for the fact that Thomas Beatie was born Tracy Lagondino, a woman. Tracy underwent a sex change 10 years ago, and legally became Thomas, and a man, but decided to keep his reproductive organs. So, after halting his testosterone regimen and waiting for his menstrual cycle to resume, Thomas was artificially inseminated.
Five months into his pregnancy, Thomas announced his condition in the gay, lesbian, and transgender publication The Advocate, explaining the process, and the associated difficulties—both medical, and in getting friends, family, and the medical community to accept him as a man who wishes to carry his family’s child.
Here’s something else to consider: aside from Junior, even, this isn’t the first time there has been buzz over a male pregnancy. In 1999 an extensive website was launched to track the pregnancy of a man named Lee Mingwei. However, the website is still up in 2008, and mister Mingwei is still apparently pregnant—the whole thing was a performance art piece by the artist Virgil Wong. This has lead some to believe that Beatie and The Advocate are pulling a similar stunt. The fact that Beatie intends to speak to the news media in two days—April 1st—doesn’t exactly lend credibility to the story.
Any thoughts? A hoax, or the real deal? And how do you feel about a man getting pregnant?
Making brand-new life forms totally from scratch.
In the forest ecosystem tiger sits at the top of the food chain as a tertiary carnivore and primary predator. Along with other major carnivores as leopard it acts as a control mechanism for herbivores or consumers. Thus it controls the population of herbivores and preserves the forest and grassland ecosystem.
The interdependency of living forms in a food chain is obvious as the wild tiger is dependant upon herbivores for its survival where he maintains there population which in turn prevents the grasslands from being overgrazed.
The herbivores depend upon the producers as grasses, herbs, shrubs, algae, fungi and large trees for survival and they in turn maintian a balance in vegetation by controling the extent of vegetation or flora.
Birds survive on herbs, shrubs and trees on fruits and nector and in turn act as seed dispersal agent for them to spread the population of the floral elements in an ecosystem.
Thus all life forms including tiger are interlinked with each other in an ecosystem and their survival depends upon how intact the ecosystem is.
from Wikimedia Commons Life is a gift. Use it wisely.
Please contact us if you have questions about the rights on this image.
Researchers think if Mars ever had water on it, it was early in its lifecycle.
A long time ago; far, far away, there might have been life on Mars.
Those are the conclusions researchers are coming to has they pull together data gathered from several space probes to the Red Planet over the past decade.
It all adds up to the possibility that Mars could have supported life during its first 1 billion years of existence. For the past 3.5 billion years, its conditions have been too harsh to sustain life as we know it. It became too cold and too dry for even the basic forms of live, microbes, to exist.
The findings of the research team were recently published in the journal Science. A team of international space experts has been studying the data gathered from various space missions.
In its first 600 million years, Mars likely had plenty of water, temperate weather and low acid levels. The research team has been able to figure that out by examining the oldest rocks they’ve found from the missions. Those rocks have been exposed on Mars’ surface due to erosion, cratering and large temblors.
Exactly were the water may have been on Mars is still up for debate. The research team keeps open the possibility that the planet’s surface never had large amounts of water covering it. Clay deposits, a key link to the presence of water on Mars, have been found beneath the planet’s surface. And the few exposed sections of clay may have been formed below the surface and later pushed up or exposed.
The tame first segment of the planet’s life was followed by 500 million years of great volcanic activity that filled the atmosphere with sulfur. Those particles fell back down in the form of sulfuric acid, while at the same time Mars began to lose its atmosphere. Then over the course of the next 300 million years, Mars got to its icy-cold, rusty-red look that it has still today.
All of this information is helping scientists plan where they want to send future Mars probes to get even more answers to these questions on Mars’ origins.
News reports last week indicated that scientists had found methane on Mars—a chemical that usually indicates life. However,
NASA says it ain't so.
"News reports on February 16, 2005, that NASA scientists from Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., have found strong evidence that life may exist on Mars are incorrect.
"NASA does not have any observational data from any current Mars missions that supports this claim. The work by the scientists mentioned in the reports cannot be used to directly infer anything about life on Mars, but may help formulate the strategy for how to search for martian life. Their research concerns extreme environments on Earth as analogs of possible environments on Mars. No research paper has been submitted by them to any scientific journal asserting martian life."
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