101–110 of 159 posts
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We should seed the universe with tardigrades. It sounds like they deserve it.
Perhaps the tardigrades have already done that.
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Unscientific trope of pure love: In German they are called Bärtierchen (lose translation: bear-thingies) whose name and appearance is reminiscent of gummy-bears.
translates more like "bear animal" actually
One thing that I have always worried about Antartic ice melting and unleashing some ancient black death like plague for which we dont have any immunity.
It would be extremely unlikely for ancient (millions years old) organism to be better at penetrating human immune system than organisms that evolved in arms race with us. It's like taking a DOS virus and expecting it to infect iphones :)
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Tardigrades are hardcore. From Wikipedia: Tardigrades are considered to be able to survive even complete global mass extinction events due to astrophysical events, such as gamma-ray bursts, or large meteorite impacts. Some of them can withstand extremely cold temperatures down to 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero), while others can withstand extremely hot temperatures up to 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C) for sev…
Sounds like a reliable self-repairing and self-replicating storage solution. Encode the data in their dna and secure it with a hash.
> Some 300 prehistoric worms were analysed - and two ‘were shown to contain viable nematodes’. This sounds like 300 non-nematode worms were examined, and two of them contained viable nematodes as parasites. Is that correct? Because everything else in the article sounds like the nematodes are the worms, rather than were in the worms. It's a tiny detail, but it's bugging me.
Why the article was published just now (the samples were taken in 2015) is a most interesting question. Probably related with the current rush to explore the martian ice pole to find life. The siberian experts would add a invaluable experience in how to attack this drill problem avoiding contamination of the sample, and taking a undisturbed core-layers of ice to date it and understand the past climate of mars.
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It would be extremely unlikely for ancient (millions years old) organism to be better at penetrating human immune system than organisms that evolved in arms race with us. It's like taking a DOS virus and expecting it to infect iphones :)
Is it true that the human "OS" (i.e., genome) has changed that radically?
On the other hand I'm very afraid what will happen when people can download, tweak, and 3d-print viruses as a hobby.
> Some 300 prehistoric worms were analysed - and two ‘were shown to contain viable nematodes’. This sounds like 300 non-nematode worms were examined, and two of them contained viable nematodes as parasites. Is that correct? Because everything else in the article sounds like the nematodes are the worms, rather than were in the worms. It's a tiny detail, but it's bugging me.
So these are probably the oldest living organisms in existence then, huh? I'm not aware of anything that's older than 42000 years, but I'd be amazed to be wrong :)
I thought the half life of DNA was around 400 years. Anyone know how this is possible?
At low temperatures (the lower you go) and low radiation (the lower you go) there is not enough energy in the system to exceed activation energy and break down DNA (meaning statistically it's extremely unlikely (arbitrarily) for enough energy to enter the system in a short enough period of time to break down the structure) (there's always the minuscule chance that some wavefunction posits enough energy into the system of course).