Strange Bacteria Sustains Itself Without Sunlight 306
Hahnsoo writes "A colony of bacteria found 2.8 kilometers below the Earth's surface in a South African gold mine is able to sustain itself without energy from the Sun. While sub-surface colonies of microorganisms utilizing sulfur (mostly near deep sea hydrothermal vents) is not new, this particular colony is unusual. The colony does it by relying on radioactive uranium to split water into hydrogen gas. Thus, instead of solar energy and photosynthesis, this species relies on radioactive materials and sulfur/hydrogen to facilitate its energy needs. There is some speculation about life on other planets in the article as well."
Forgive my ignorance (Score:2, Interesting)
In case it is about 'normal' uranium, would it be viable to use its radioactvity as a power source without the creepy fission reactions? Would it then also be possible to turn human nuclear waste into a useful energy source? Or is the amount of energy released by radioactivity too small to turn into useful work?
Good news for life on earth (Score:3, Interesting)
On a practical note I wonder what a handful of this particular type would make of a nuclear waste pile...
Re:Good news for life on earth (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear Waste (Score:1, Interesting)
I think that more research should go into seeing if the bacteria could break down nuclear waste. And if it can't, at least drop a bucket full on North Korea!
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see how bacteria could adapt to live 2.5km below the ground. If they are surface organisms which get subducted then they should be killed almost immediately and will wind up in the mantle in any case.
Re:Simple Nuclear Chemistry Lesson (Score:1, Interesting)
Except for the 2000 people who developed thyroid cancer. But hey, the opposite end of the scale from hippies are the corporatists, who figure it's fine to kill a few people with lingering, painful and expensive deaths, as long as their share price goes up a buck or two from it. And if their stock doesn't, they'll invest in hospitals to hedge their bets.
It's the price of "progress", as long as they don't have to pay it.
Another effect of Chernobyl (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:1, Interesting)
Chernobyl, Windscale, Three Mile Island.
We're told that current nuclear plants are safe, and not like the ones that exploded or went up in flames. At the time the plants which are now acknowledged to be dangerous were being constructed, the public were also told that they were completely safe. The public can be forgiven for not believing that an industry with a history of serial lies on safety is now both safe and truthful about it for once.
Also, I don't suppose they were actually intending to have any accidents, or for some of the radioactive leaks - though BNFL's own propaganda admits they deliberately discharged nuclear waste into the sea. Humans make mistakes, which is another reason nuclear isn't trusted.
Thirdly, terrorism. You don't get coal-fired suicide bombers.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
Electric motors are much more efficient.
Electricity can come from non-polluting sources.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years.
Pollution from a few sources is more easily managed and disperses less than from millions of ground level sources.
Electric cars are simpler mechanically, more reliable and easier to repair.
Electric cars accelerate faster and can use regenerative braking.
Existing range limitations can be overcome with improved battery chemistry.
see www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com to see why we're not driving them and why all the EV1's were destroyed.
Offtopic but you did ask.
Re:Please... (Score:2, Interesting)
Does that mean, that on Earth the "big elements" are actually from big OLD stars from Long Long ago..almost at the time of big Bang??
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can accept this, then realize there are two more things that follow naturally.
1. this has happened before. Probably more than once. The "spark of life" likely happened repeatedly over the eons on earth and was simply snuffed out by a falling rock or blob of lava or unfriendly temperatures or a sudden shift of pH or whathaveyou. The one that eventually led to what we consider "life" here just got a little luckier than the rest.
2. since this is already being attributed to absurd chance, take a gambler's perpective on it. If the odds of winning one lottery are one in a million, and the odds of winning another lottery are one in five million, and we have already seen someone win the $1m lottery, is it sensible to say that no one can win the $5m lottery because the odds are too low? If you have already seen the high odds fail to deny a winner, why does making the odds a little worse suddenly preclude the possibility?
Really, it doesn't matter what the odds are, so long as they are nonzero. If you roll the dice enough times it doesn't matter. Everything that can happen eventually will happen.
True, it would be easier for life to evolve into this radiation-sustained form from another form of life, but it's certainly not impossible for genesis in that situation. Just a lot less likely. But when you are talking about things that have the patience of and that operate on the timescale of genesis or evolution, if the odds are one in a billion you may as well say it's going to happen sometime this morning.
Re:I'm not convinced by extraterrestrial argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Evolution happens bit by bit, so for an organism to exist, it needs to be in an environment that is hospitable enough to allow molecules to become more and more complex, to allow organisms to evolve and adapt. After all, it is "possible" for the all right atoms/molecules to align and create a human being.
The question should really be since this organism can exist, what other environments are possible (i.e. besides a planet) where something could evolve similar to this.
In an infinite universe, that has no end, will all things possible happen?
Re:This is strange? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hindenburg disaster? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's partly true. The burning covering provided the soot that was able to glow and make the flames visible. Hydrogen flames are almost invisible.
However, urban legends about the extreme flammability of the doping notwithstanding, there is NO WAY a vessel the size of the Titanic could be vaporized in 30 seconds, throwing a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the air, unless the reaction was driven mainly by the burning hydrogen gas. The gas did dissipate quickly; it just happened to be burning as it did.
Actually, that's not entirely correct (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, that's not entirely correct. No star we know produces elements heavier than iron and nickel, which aren't very radioactive. In fact, they're the most stable nuclei we know.
The thing is, anything lower than iron and nickel tends to release energy when fused into something heavier. Anything heavier than that needs to absorb energy to fuse into something even heavier, and conversely releases some energy when split.
So eventually the reaction stops at iron and nickel. Given intense photon bombardment in the star, most nickel actually disintegrates right back into smaller nuclei, not fuse further into heavier stuff. Iron pretty doesn't do anything whatsoever, and just stays iron.
The thing there is that as you move upwards, the energy and temperature requirements tend to be insane. For example for the next step up from fusing hydrogen into helium, it takes a red giant and temperatures of about 100 _million_ Kelvin to even fuse helium into carbon before blowing itself up.
And most stars either (A) stop short of even that and become a red dwarf, or (B) blow themselves up within seconds when they start fusing helium, because that's a very unstable reaction, whose rate increases with temperature, and temperature increases with fusion rate.
But at any rate, even if you had a star massive enough, you wouldn't get many nuclei past iron, or you wouldn't get them out of the star. By the moment a star got massive and hot enough to start fusing iron into something heavier, it would just rapidly lose heat in that reaction. It just can't explode that way, so at most you'd get a black hole in the end of it all.
So since you mention stars exploding... well, that's actually where the heavier elements come from. Supernovae don't just spread those heavier metals, they _create_ them. The iron, carbon, helium and whatever else was created will be smashed with tremendous amounts of energy and at insane temperatures, and a lot of it will fuse into heavier stuff. And since the star is already blowing up, they'll get spread all over the place.
Re:Simple Nuclear Chemistry Lesson (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm still unhappy about the waste created [rochester.edu]: "Most of the radioactive isotopes in high level waste emit large amounts of radiation and have extremely long half-lives (some longer than 100,000 years) creating long time periods before the waste will settle to safe levels of radioactivity."
<sarcasm> Future generations will probably be sincerely delighted about how responsibly we are handling radioactivity today, if they manage to notice before it is too late. [slashdot.org]</sarcasm>
Re:Please... (Score:5, Interesting)
As Carl Sagan said, "We are all made of starstuff.".
Re:Hindenburg disaster? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:3, Interesting)
The accident took the power plant offline. People didn't stop using electricity, so other power plants on the grid produced more to compensate. They were burning coal. Taking the Office of Technology Assessment numbers for premature deaths from pollution, somebody estimated 50 deaths every year, not because of the reactor, but because of its absence from the power grid.
Really interesting to me (Score:3, Interesting)
news on chernobyl shows that life can adapt to radioactivity quicker and better than we thought too.
Re:Please... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:1, Interesting)
The US has around 2700 power plants, and half its electricity comes from coal. So, roughly, we're killing 67,000 people a year because of those coal plants substituting for the (non-existent) nuclear plants.
In 2006, there were proposals for 154 new coal plants. That'll kill an additional 7,700 people per year.
This is supposed to be an argument against nuclear power?
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:2, Interesting)