Antigravics

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 771822.htm

The veined octopus covers the coconut shell with its body before lifting it up (Museum Victoria)

>> Two scientists at the Melbourne Museum have recorded the first case of tool use in an invertebrate animal.

The veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selects, stacks, transports and assembles coconut shells as portable armour.

Many octopuses use available objects such as shells and rocks for shelter, but that is not considered tool use.

Dr Mark Norman says what makes these animals so special is the the planned future use of the coconut shells.

"It comes at a cost, carrying these shells in this awkward way and it's a fantastic example of complex behaviours in what we consider the lower life forms," he said.

"I think these sorts of behaviours are everywhere in nature. There's really complex behaviours that we write off because we think we're the clever ones."

He and colleague Dr Julian Finn spent more than 500 hours diving in remote waters off Indonesia to observe and film the animals.

They watched the octopuses dig out coconut shells from the ocean floor and empty the shells of mud using jets of water.

Dr Finn says it is not unusual for octopuses to live inside coconuts but it is how the veined octopus uses the shells that is unique.

"It gathers them together, it stacks them like bowls, covers its whole body over bowls, lifts them up and then trundles along on its arm tips until a predator comes or there's a threat," he said.

"Then it closes them over like a ball and hides inside."

This series of actions are among the most complex ever recorded for octopuses.>>>

http://www.physorg.com/news183119740.html

>> For more than a century, biologists have marveled at the highly cooperative nature of ants, bees and other social insects that work together to determine the survival and growth of a colony.

The social interactions are much like cells working together in a single body, hence the term "superorganism" — an organism comprised of many organisms, according to James Gillooly, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of biology at UF's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Now, researchers from UF, the University of Oklahoma and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have taken the same mathematical models that predict lifespan, growth and reproduction in individual organisms and used them to predict these features in whole colonies.

By analyzing data from 168 different social insect species including ants, termites, bees and wasps, the authors found that the lifespan, growth rates and rates of reproduction of whole colonies when considered as superorganisms were nearly indistinguishable from individual organisms.

"In life, two of the major evolutionary innovations have been how cells came together to function as a single organism, and how individuals joined together to function as a society," said Gillooly, who is a member of the UF Genetics Institute. "Relatively speaking, we understand a considerable amount about how the size of multicellular organisms affects the life cycle of individuals based on metabolic theory, but now we are showing this same theoretical framework helps predict the life cycle of whole societies of organisms."

Researchers note that insect societies make up a large fraction of the total biomass on Earth, and say the finding may have implications for human societies.

"Certainly one of the reasons folks have been interested in social insects and the consequences of living in groups is that it tells us about our own species," said study co-author Michael Kaspari, Ph.D., a presidential professor of zoology, ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Oklahoma and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "There is currently a vigorous debate on how sociality evolved. We suggest that any theory of sociality be consistent with the amazing convergence in the way nonsocial and social organisms use energy." >>>

http://www.physorg.com/news184268013.html

>> Space is a hostile environment for living things, but small organisms on the Expose-E experiment unit outside Europe's Columbus ISS laboratory module have resisted the solar UV radiation, cosmic rays, vacuum and varying temperatures for 18 months. A certain lichen seems to be particularly happy in open space!

Here on Earth, living organisms can be found almost everywhere, from the abysses of the oceans to the highest mountain peaks. Even extremely dry deserts and cold glaciers support some kind of life.

Recent findings from Martian meteorite samples provide stronger evidence that life might have existed within our neighbouring planet too, so perhaps there is also some kind of life on the red surface of Mars.

To find out how our terrestrial organisms survive in space conditions, ESA has backed astrobiological research for more than 20 years. “The purpose is to increase our knowledge on the origin, evolution and adaptations of life and also provide an experimental basis for recommendations for planetary protection,” says René Demets, a biologist working in ESA.

The most recent experiment carrier was Expose-E, launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in February 2008 aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis and carried back to Earth by Space Shuttle Discovery last September. A total of 664 biological and biochemical samples were exposed to open space for 18 months.

Expose-E is a suitcase-sized box divided into two layers of three experiment trays, each holding four squared recesses. All but two of these 12 boxes hold a suite of biological or biochemical samples in small compartments.

Two of the three trays were directly exposed to the vacuum of space and the third has gas inside, simulating the thin martian atmosphere consisting mainly of carbon dioxide. The window protecting the ‘martian samples’ also had an optical filter imitating the solar spectrum on the martian surface. Two layers of similar experiment trays were used, to have one layer on top exposed to solar light and another underneath in shadow.

An almost identical experiment carrier, Expose-R, remains at the ISS, where it is installed on the Russian part of the station.

Expose-E samples were provided by eight international scientific groups and the project is coordinated by the Microgravity User Support Centre (MUSC) at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) under the European programme for Life and Physical sciences and applications using the International Space Station (ELIPS) of ESA’s Directorate of Human Spaceflight. The research groups are now examining the samples and have released some preliminary scientific results.

“These Xanthoria elegans lichens were flown on Expose-E and they are the best survivors we know,” explains Demets. Lichen is a sort of macroscopic composite organism of a fungus and a photosynthetic partner that is typically alga or cyanobacterium.

“These can be found typically in the most extreme places on Earth. When they are put in an environment they don’t like, they put themselves in off-mode and wait for better conditions. Once you put them back in a suitable environment and give them some water, they just carry on living as before.”

The key issue is water: it is almost immediately vaporised in the vacuum of space. Only anhydrobiotic organisms, which are dry and capable of sustaining long periods in extremely dry conditions, can survive space vacuum. Apart from lichens, only a few animals and plants can resist the vacuum: water-bears, brine shrimp and larvae of the African midge Polypedilum vanderplank are the only animals known to survive open space. Some dried plant seeds are also dry enough.

Other space hazards are the repeated extreme temperature changes and radiation. “Radiation is a big danger for life in space”, says Demets. “Cosmic rays are very energetic and ionising, but the most damaging is the hard UV radiation from the Sun. Here on the ground, UV-C is used mainly in applications where you need to kill bacteria.” Over time the effects of high-energy particles, X-rays and gamma radiation are more important, because they destroy DNA and cause genetic mutations.


Xanthoria elegans
Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are very small, segmented animals. The largest species is just over one millimetre in length. Water bears live in temporary ponds and droplets of water in soil and on moist plants. They are known to survive under conditions that would kill most organisms - they can withstand temperatures ranging from -272 deg C to +150 deg C, they can be without water for a period of 10 years, and they are extremely resistant to radiation.

MUSC is conducting a parallel ground simulation exposing similar samples to the same environmental parameters as in space, with the exception of low gravity and ionising radiation. “This simulation will last throughout the whole mission and after this we will have the final results,” says Demets. “I can’t wait for that moment, because we already know that we’ll have interesting results.”

The fact that living organisms do survive in open space seems to support the idea of panspermia - life spreading from planet to another, or even between solar systems. “The loose end in this theory is now arrival at a planet, because no living thing can survive the fiery entry through an atmosphere,” Demets says. “But possibly deep inside a space rock the conditions are better. Therefore we’re now thinking of an astrobiology experiment involving a return to Earth”. >>>

http://www.physorg.com/news184915200.html

>> According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation. As members of this planet’s menagerie, and a consequence of nearly 4 billion years of evolution, humans have a purpose to propagate life. After all, whatever else life is, it necessarily possesses an incessant drive for self-perpetuation. And the idea isn’t just fantasy: Mautner says that “directed panspermia” missions can be accomplished with present technology.

“We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life,” Mautner explained to PhysOrg.com. “Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose.”

As Mautner explains in his study published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cosmology, the strategy is to deposit an array of primitive organisms on potentially fertile planets and protoplanets throughout the universe. Like the earliest life on Earth, organisms such as cyanobacteria could seed other planets, digest toxic gases (such as ammonia and carbon dioxide on early Earth) and release products such as oxygen which promote the evolution of more complex species. To increase their chances of success, the microbial payloads should contain a variety of organisms with various environmental tolerances, and hardy multicellular organisms such as rotifer eggs to jumpstart higher evolution. These organisms may be captured into asteroids and comets in the newly forming solar systems and transported from there by impacts to planets as their host environments develop.

Mautner has identified potential breeding grounds, which include extrasolar planets, accretion disks surrounding young stars that hold the gas and dust of future planets, and - at an even earlier stage - interstellar clouds that hold the materials to create stars. He explains that the Kepler mission may identify hundreds of biocompatible extrasolar planets, and astronomers are already aware of several accretion disks and interstellar clouds that could serve as targets. These potential habitats range in distance from a few light-years to 500 or more light-years away.

To transport the microorganisms, Mautner proposes using sail-ships. These ships offer a low-cost transportation method with solar sails, which can achieve high velocities using the radiation pressure from light. The microorganisms could be bundled in tiny capsules, each containing about 100,000 microorganisms and weighing 0.1 micrograms. Mautner predicts that the most challenging part of the process would be the precise aiming required in order for a mission to arrive at its target destination after hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years of travel.

Accounting for the difficulties of each of the steps involved, Mautner has calculated how many microbial capsules would be needed to ensure a reasonable probability of success. He concludes that a few hundred tons of microbial biomass “can seed dozens of new solar systems in an interstellar cloud with life for eons.” With launch costs of $10,000/kg, this amount of biomass would cost about $1 billion to launch. If we can aim precisely at planets in nearby solar systems, the mission would require significantly fewer capsules, smaller biomass, and lower costs. Mautner predicts that, while the technology is currently available, such an initiative will be easier to implement as space infrastructure develops and launch costs decrease.

As Mautner notes, several scientists have previously proposed ways to seed planets (notably, Venus and Mars) in our own solar system with microorganisms in order to alter the atmosphere and possibly make them habitable for humans. Also, some theories suggest that, on Earth, life-supporting nutrients and materials - or even life itself - may have come from somewhere else in the universe, arriving here on meteors, asteroids, and comets. In a sense, Mautner’s proposal would simply be helping life’s planet-hopping journey continue.

But, some critics might ask, what if extraterrestrial life already exists somewhere else, and we infect it with our own invasive genetic material? First of all, Mautner explains that we can minimize these chances by targeting very primitive locations where life could not have evolved yet. In addition, he argues that, since extraterrestrial life is not currently known to exist, our first concern should be with preserving our family of organic gene/protein life that we know exists.

In the long term, Mautner is hopeful that life can continue existing beyond our home planet. Using techniques from astroecology based on the energy output of stars, he calculates that the amount of sustainable life can be significant in other neighborhoods of the universe. Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure how everything will turn out after we’re long gone.

“May life last indefinitely?” he writes. “The habitable lifetime of the galaxy may depend on the dark matter and energy. These forces may need to be observed for many more eons to predict their future behaviour. During those cosmological times our descendants may understand nature more deeply and seek to extend life indefinitely.” >>>>

Why should human being have this urge/command to understand their environment, to ask the question, WHY ???

This innate imperative is to focus existence upon survival... the more the absolute reality is understood, the greater chance of survival for the individual and the greater good.

So why would human beings want to survive ? Why do they want to have children ?

Why should they care at all... death is inevitable

LIFE has two options, one is the default option, germinate/differentiate/detoxify/flower/seed and then the death of the parent.... the annual option

The other option for LIFE is the perennial option, one where instead of the flowers falling and the subsequent death of the parent, the fungus/plant/LIFE deliberately goes forth and germinates sucklings in other suitable rocks in the Universe.

The perennial option is magnitudes above the annual option, in not only knowledge and achievement, but in its ability to survive. To keep on reliving the past is slow and painful.

So science is the quest to perennial survival.

[ NOTE: LIFE includes all life forms on Earth, and is considered as one single super-organism, which has common innate genetic imperatives (in each super-cell species), controlling LIFE's differentiation and LIFE's direction of purpose. The all is the one, and the one is the all ]

http://www.physorg.com/news184915200.html
>> Eventually, the day will come when life on Earth ends. Whether that’s tomorrow or five billion years from now, whether by nuclear war, climate change, or the Sun burning up its fuel, the last living cell on Earth will one day wither and die.

But that doesn’t mean that all is lost. What if we had the chance to sow the seeds of terrestrial life throughout the universe, to settle young planets within developing solar systems many light-years away, and thus give our long evolutionary line the chance to continue indefinitely?

According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation. >>>

>> Moths of the Hawaiian genus Hyposmocoma are an oddball crowd: One of the species' caterpillars attacks and eats tree snails. Now researchers have described at least a dozen different species that live underwater for several weeks at a time.

"I couldn't believe it," said study co-author Daniel Rubinoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu, of the first time he spotted a submerged caterpillar. "I assumed initially they were terrestrial caterpillars ... how were they holding their breath?"

Each of the 12 species lives in and along streams running down the mountains on several different islands of Hawaii, said Rubinoff, who has studied Hyposmocoma, a group of more than 350 moth species, for more than seven years.

They usually eat algae or lichen, and build silk cases -- which one species even adorns with bird feathers -- for shelter and camouflage. They spin silk drag lines to withstand the high pressure of fast flood waters.

Unlike other amphibious creatures that can survive underwater on stored oxygen but must come back up for air, these caterpillars can spend several weeks without ever breaking the surface, according to the paper, which was published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It isn't yet clear how the insects do it. Rubinoff and co-worker Patrick Schmitz of the University of Hawaii did not find any water-blocking stopper over the caterpillars' tracheae or evidence of gills. The animals drowned quickly when kept in standing water, so they seem to need the higher levels of oxygen present in running water, and probably absorb it directly through pores in their body, the scientists said.

The trait appears to have evolved more than once, Rubinoff said. After analyzing the DNA of the 12 amphibious species, the scientists found that three separate lineages of moth had developed the ability to breathe underwater at different points in the past.

Why they evolved this trick isn't clear, but animals and plants are known to often evolve in surprising directions after arriving at new, sparsely populated habitats such as islands, said Felix A.H. Sperling, an entomologist with the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

In a new environment, released of the pressure of having to fight for food sources or evade predators, they are freer to expand into new niches.

"When the pressures on an environment are released, what crazy things are animals capable of doing?" said John W. Brown, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"You just wonder ... do all animals have that potential?"

http://www.physorg.com/news188546081.html

>>> Microorganisms can indeed live in extreme environments, but the ones that do are highly adapted to survive and little else, according to a collaboration that includes Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the University of Oklahoma.

The metagenomic study of a "stressed" microbial community in groundwater near a former waste disposal pond site on DOE's Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) revealed microbes with an overabundance of genes involved in DNA recombination and repair and other defense mechanisms for dealing with contaminants and other environmental stresses.

The studies, said ORNL researcher David Watson, are ultimately aimed at developing biologically based methods for reducing the level of the contaminants in the groundwater, which at the ORR site includes nitrates, solvents and heavy metals, including uranium.

"We are looking to better understand the evolution of microbes in the groundwater plume," Watson said. "The microbes that can break down nitrate into nitrogen can have a long-term benefit toward attenuating the plume."

Watson added that researchers particularly want to better understand the genetic makeup of microbes that can metabolize oxidized forms of uranium into a form that is only slightly soluble and thus easier to precipitate and remove from the groundwater environment.

ORNL's Watson was joined in the study by the University of Oklahoma's Jizhong Zhou and Christopher Hemme; Joint Genome Institute Director Eddy Rubin; and a team that included researchers from ORNL's Environmental Sciences Division, the University of Oklahoma's Institute for Environmental Genomics, Montana State University, Michigan State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

They found that the naturally occurring populations of microbes in the polluted groundwater--which consisted of only a few cell types-- had "very simple" genetic structures tuned primarily to overcoming the stresses presented by the toxic soup, which has a highly acidic pH level of 3.5.

The accumulation of genes involved in resistance and responses to stress appears to be a basic survival strategy that has left the microbes with a marked loss in metabolic diversity.

The waste ponds, which are now part of the Oak Ridge Environmental Remediation Sciences Program Integrated Field Research Center, have been out of use for decades and were capped in 1983.

http://www.physorg.com/news189103321.html

>> Earthworms form herds and make "group decisions", scientists have discovered.

The earthworms use touch to communicate and influence each other's behaviour, according to research published in the journal Ethology.

By doing so the worms collectively decide to travel in the same direction as part of a single herd.

The striking behaviour, found in the earthworm Eisenia fetida, is the first time that any type of worm, or annelid, has been shown to form active herds.

"Our results modify the current view that earthworms are animals lacking in social behaviour," says Ms Lara Zirbes, a PhD student at the University of Liege in Gembloux in Belgium.

"We can consider the earthworm behaviour as equivalent the of a herd or swarm."

Ms Zirbes and colleagues were originally interested in how earthworms interact with other microorganisms in the soil.

These interactions are part of the important ecological role of that earthworms play.

However, the researchers began to notice that the earthworms seemed also to interact with each other.

"In experiments, I noticed that earthworms frequently clustered and formed a compact patch when they were out of the soil," Ms Zirbes told the BBC.

So Ms Zirbes and her colleagues set up a series of experiments to test how earthworms decided where to go, and whether they preferred to travel alone or in groups.

They chose the earthworm Eisenia fetida, which tends to live near or at the soil surface, typically within the litter lining forest floors.

First, they placed 40 earthworms into a central chamber, from which extended two identical arms.

The idea was to leave the animals alone, and then to see how many earthworms moved to either arm over a 24-hour period.

Over 30 identical repeats of the trial, the worms preferred to group within one chamber over the other.

"We noted that earthworms moving out of the central chamber influenced the directional choice of other earthworms.

"So our hypothesis was confirmed: a social cue influences earthworm behaviour," says Ms Zirbes.

A second experiment tested how the worms affected each other's behaviour, investigating whether the worms use either chemical signals or touch to decide which chamber to move to.

The researchers placed one worm at the start of a soil-filled maze, with two routes to a food source at the end.

After the worm chose its route to the food, the researchers added a second worm to see if it followed the same route as the first.

However, after repeated trials, the second worms were no more likely to take the same route as their predecessors. This indicated that the worms did not leave a chemical trail behind them that communicated their direction of travel.

Yet if two worms were placed together at the start of the maze, they were more likely to follow one another, suggesting that they used touch to communicate where they were going.

In two-thirds of these trials, the worms followed each other.

"I have observed contact between two earthworms. Sometimes they just cross their bodies and sometimes they maximise contact. Out of soil, earthworms can form balls," says Ms Zirbes.

A modelling study then showed that, by using touch alone, up to 40 earthworms could follow each other in a similar way, explaining how herds of the animals preferred to move together into one chamber in the initial experiments.

"To our knowledge this is the first example of collective orientation in animals based on contact between followers," the researchers wrote in the journal.

"It is also the first one of collective movements of annelids."

The researchers suspect that other earthworm species may behave in a similar way. They now hope to investigate why the animals come together to form herds.

One reason may be that clustering helps the worms protect themselves.

Individual Eisenia fetida earthworms secrete proteins and fluids which have antibacterial properties, potentially deterring soil pathogens.

They also secrete a yellow fluid to deter predatory flatworms.

Gathering into groups may increase the amount of fluids covering the earthworms and hence better protect individuals, the researchers say.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 604584.stm

>> Here's the good news: you are a male and you are allowed to have sex, at most, twice in your life. If that's the good news -- you may well ask -- what's the bad news? It's this: if you copulate for longer than 10 seconds, you get eaten by your sex partner. Thus is the challenge facing the male of the orb-web spider, Argiope bruennichi, according to a scientific paper published on Wednesday.

The tiny, common European spider is best known for the classic wheel-like web beloved of children's drawings.

But beneath this cosy exterior the species has a terrifying tradition of sexual cannibalism.

The males have a pair of mating organs, known as pedipalps, one of which they use for each copulation -- in other words, twice is their limit.

But females gobble up the much smaller males whenever they mate for longer than 10 seconds.

That means the male has to be pretty choosy about the fittest female on which he should confer his precious sperm. But which one?

Seeking to find out, Klaas Welke and Jutta Schneider of the Zoological Institute in Hamburg, Germany, nurtured spiders from eggs found in local meadows and fed the beasts on tasty morsels of fruitfly until adulthood.

"Only virgin spiders were used for the experiment," says the paper, reassuringly.

The spiders were then put to the test.

Males were put on a love couch either with a sister spider or an unrelated spider.

Time and again, males which were paired with a sibling copulated briefly, which meant they escaped cannibalism and lived to love another day.

But when they were paired with a non-sibling, the males' copulation went on for longer.

Yes, the males ended up getting eaten. But this way there was no risk of inbreeding, as there would be by having spiderlings with his sister.

That meant the spider had a better chance for his offspring to be healthy and to survive.

http://www.physorg.com/news191010185.html

>> (PhysOrg.com) -- The survival of life on Earth is possible only within a relatively narrow temperature range known as the "Goldilocks Zone," which ranges from around 0 to 100°C. In many ecosystems life is limited by cold temperatures rather than hot because of the reliance on liquid water for survival. Now new research has shown that in the presence of a certain type of solution, large populations of microbes can survive at the incredibly low temperature of -80°C, which is far below the accepted Goldilocks Zone. Since similar solutions exist on cold planets and moons such as Mars and Europa, this increases the likelihood that life may be found there.

Microbes called “extremophiles” are known to thrive in extreme conditions such as near hot water vents on the seabed, where the temperature can rise to 120°C, but until now scientists thought cold temperatures were more limiting because at low temperatures cell membranes become increasingly rigid.

A team of microbiologists led by Dr John Hallsworth, Lecturer in Environmental Microbiology at Queen’s University Belfast in Ireland, thought a special type of solute might prevent the water in cells from freezing, and could also reverse the rigidity of cold membranes. The solutes are called chaotropic after their property of disordering cellular macromolecules.

The research team first confirmed that glycerol, a solute often used to preserve cells at low temperatures in the laboratory, becomes chaotropic when present in high concentrations. They then grew extremophiles on a medium supplemented with either chaotropic or kosmotropic solutes (which stabilize macromolecules rather than destabilize them).

Starting with four types of xerophilic fungi (aerobic extremophiles that thrive in environments with little water), the scientists found that at 30°C the fungi grew well in the presence of both chaotropic and kosmotropic solutes, but at 1.7°C the fungi on media supplemented with chaotropes grew better than those on kosmotropes, with some of the latter showing zero growth.

Hallsworth and his team then harvested spores from the xerophilic fungi and exposed them to temperatures as low as -80°C. Of the fungi from media supplemented with kosmotrope solutes, 60% died in the harsh conditions, while only 5% of the chaotrope group died. Hallsworth said the findings mean the so-called Goldilocks Zone may be much more extensive than previously envisaged because many cold planets and moons contain all the necessary ingredients for making chaotropic solutes. >.

(A) Aerial photograph of Pitch Lake. Sampling sites marked by black circles. (B and C) Bubbles of varying sizes form on the surface of the liquid asphalt under varying viscosities. (D) Terrestrial mud volcano at Devil's Woodyard (MV). Scale bars indicate approximately 5 cm. Image credit: Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Arxiv, arxiv.org/abs/1004.2047

>> (PhysOrg.com) -- A lake of natural hot liquid asphalt in Trinidad and Tobago has been found to be teeming with microbes despite the toxic environment. The lake, aptly named Pitch Lake (since pitch is the old name for tar), is the nearest analog so far discovered to the seas of hydrocarbon on Saturn's moon, Titan, and raises the question of whether or not water should be considered as necessary for life.

Pitch Lake, located near La Brea in southwest Trinidad, covers an area of almost 40 hectares (100 acres), is around 75 meters deep, and is the largest surface reservoir of liquid asphalt in the world, supplying asphalt for roads on the east coast of the US. The temperatures of the liquid range from 30 to 55°C, and a hydrocarbon mix of methane, propane and ethane constantly bubbles up from the liquid. Isotope studies of the gas bubbles suggest they are produced by microbial activity.

Researchers led by Washington State University astrobiologist Dr Dirk Schulze-Makuch found the Caribbean island lake is full of living organisms, despite the extremely toxic environment, and despite it having no oxygen and almost no water. The population levels reported by the researchers were 1-10 million single-celled organisms per gram of the foul-smelling liquid.

Gene sequencing of the microbes showed many kinds were present, such as bacteria and archea, which are single-celled organisms lacking a nucleus. Around thirty percent of the species were previously unknown.

Dr Schulze-Makuch said some of the microbes lived on sulfur, iron, or methane and other hydrocarbons, and some even breathed out metals. Schulze-Makuch said the microbes were distinctly different from those found in the Los Angeles LaBrea tar pits and other natural pitch seeps, and the only similar life forms ever found were in samples of hydrocarbons taken from sub-sea oil wells.

The researchers were most excited by the implications their discovery may have for the possible presence of life on Titan. The Saturnian moon has all the necessary elements for life, except that its seas are filled with methane instead of water, but the asphalt lake microbes survive well with almost no water, and other microbes have been found that create their own water by breaking down hydrocarbons. Dr Schulze-Makuch stresses, however, that life surviving in such toxic environments and arising in them in the first place are very different propositions. He also admitted that it is possible the microbes could have lived in minute reservoirs of water trapped within the asphalt.

The findings may mean that NASA’s motto of “follow the water” in its search for extraterrestrial life forms could lead to missing life existing where there is far less water than conventionally thought to be necessary.

NASA's "follow the water" policy (more like "follow the water" talk) is a good one until we learn more about these asphalt eaters. However, in spite of the obfuscations, the indications are that liquid water in commonplace on Mars and a good portion of that water is probably not saturated w/ salts nor contaminated w/ toxic levels perchlorate. Whether or not there is life on Mars remains to seen (well..., not quite true) because NASA has a policy of NOT sending any more life detecting instrumentation since the successful 70's voyager program. Why is that? NASA would never keep anything from it's paying public.

http://www.physorg.com/news191046649.html