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| Home > Random > Hand me the "Clorox wipes", please. |
| Hand me the "Clorox wipes", please. | | Date Created: Feb 25, 2005, 09:37 AM |
 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A newly discovered life form that froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, a NASA (news - web sites) scientist reported on Wednesday, in a finding he said has implications for possible contemporary life on Mars.
The organism -- a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium -- probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, said Richard Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
OK...that's just plain creepy. Frozen for 30,000 years and it's still alive? Maybe I've been watching too many zombie movies recently, but news like this always gives me the willies -- not as much as clowns, but still pretty significantly willy inducing. So, our polar ice caps are melting and now we find out that they're potentially full of undiscovered microbes. Great.
Oh well, the bird flu will kill us long before that. No. Really.
HO CHI MINH CITY (Reuters) - Asian countries battling a bird flu virus that threatens to create a human pandemic that could kill millions need urgent help from the wealthy West if they are to succeed, a 28-nation conference said on Friday.
On a happier note, it seems to me that this frozen bacteria discovery could provide a little more evidence that we may one day find some sort of life on Mars -- or at least that such a discovery is possible. I'm not sure people really realize the significance of finding even a tiny microbe on Mars. Right now we assume life in the universe is pretty rare. Finding life on Mars (only the second planet we've really spent any time exploring, including our own) makes it two-for-two. With one discovery, life in the universe goes from rare to common.
To quote Sagan: If it is only us...it seems like an awful waste of space.
By the way, the stuffed GiantMicrobe from Mars Rock ALH 8400, shown in the picture, is available at GiantMicrobes.com. This was one of my Christmas presents, along with Brewers Yeast, and a Bedbug. What do you get for the geek who has everything? How about a stuffed Streptococcus pyogenes (flesh eating bacteria)? |
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