Largest Undersea Methane seep harbours variety of extreme life

U.S. researchers say they've discovered what may be the world's largest methane seep on the ocean floor, where life thrives under extreme conditions.

A marine research expedition sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration located the seep deep in the western North Atlantic Ocean, far from the life-sustaining energy of the sun.

Life exists in the seep using a process known as chemosynthesis, which begins with bacteria that use the methane to make energy, researchers said.

That forms the basis for life in the harsh environment and could help scientists better understand how organisms can survive under these types of extreme conditions, they said.

"Studies of this kind and of these communities help scientists understand how life thrives in harsh environments, and perhaps even on other planets," researcher Steve Ross of the University of North Carolina Wilmington said.

The unique ecosystem, almost two-thirds of a mile long and hundreds or yards across, is host to a variety of sea creatures including sea cucumbers, mussels, shrimp and a variety of fish, the researchers said.

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: Traces of Past Life Discovered?

As space fans anticipate news of organic molecules from the Mars Curiosity rover – cryptically teased by the mission's chief scientist, John Grotzinger, there's one man who is even more excited than most.

Former NASA researcher Gilbert Levin says that a positive sign of organics by Curiosity would confirm his claim that NASA has already seen evidence for life on Mars – from an experiment called Labeled Release that went to the Red Planet aboard the Viking mission.

If Curiosity has found evidence for organics, as many are hoping, "that removes the last barrier to my interpretation of the Labeled Release results, and leaves us free and clear", Levin reported.

Though the prospect of new Curiosity findings have set the internet abuzz, nobody from NASA has yet said publicly what they are: Grotzinger has refused to elaborate journalists, to a presentation scheduled for the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, which begins on 3 December.

Is life from Earth scattered all over our Milky Way?

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs would have thrown billions of tonnes of rock and water out into space. Credit: NASA

A team of scientists from Japan are suggesting that the asteroid impact that killed dinosaurs may have also spread life from Earth throughout our Milky Way.
 
65 million years ago, a 10km-wide asteroid smashed into the Earth and brought the 165 million-year reign of the dinosaurs to an end.

It also spewed billions of tonnes of (potentially) life-bearing rock out into space. The Japanese team of physicists believe they have calculated what happened to it all.

The immediate effects of a trillion-tonne rock smashing to the Earth are well documented, global wildfires, mega-tsunamis and mass extinctions, but the impact would have also thrown out billions of tonnes of water and rock that could have carried microbial life with it.

Researchers from Kyoto Sangyo University, in Japan believe they know where some of these rocks went.


They have focused their efforts on the chunks of rock that may have landed in areas of the galaxy where life could potentially prosper.

On the shortlist were moons and planets thought to possess water, such as Jupiter’s moon, Europa; Saturn’s moon, Enceladus and Earth-like exoplanets orbiting other stars.

Surprisingly, they have calculated that almost as much ejecta (rock and ice) would have landed on Enceladus as on the Moon – around a hundred million individual rocks.

But the largest proportion of these rocks are thought to have ended up interstellar space.

The team has estimated that about 1,000 pieces of “Earth rock” would have reached the red dwarf star, Gliese 581, where at least six planets have been identified as candidates for life.

Gliese 581 is located 20.3 light years from Earth, so it would have taken the rocks about a million years to make the journey.

Scientists don’t know if microbial life could survive such an extended journey through the cold vacuum of space, but the possibility that some sort of life from Earth could have made its home there is something the paper considers.

Based on this premise, the team have calculated how long it would take for ejecta from Earth to seed the entire galaxy with life.

They suggest that it would take about a trillion years (1,000 billion) to spread through a volume of space the size of our Milky Way. Well, it is only 10-13 billion years old.

Paul Snelgrove at TED: A census of the ocean

Oceanographer Paul Snelgrove shares the results of a ten-year project with one goal: to take a census of all the life in the oceans. He shares amazing photos of some of the surprising finds of the Census of Marine Life.

Paul Snelgrove led the group that pulled together the findings of the Census of Marine Life -- synthesizing 10 years and 540 expeditions into a book of wonders. Full bio »

UK Scientists find New Extreme Life at Deep Sea Volcanic Vent - Yeti Crabs

British scientists have discovered an astonishing range of creatures living in one of the most inhospitable regions of the deep sea.

Researchers have been exploring and taking samples from the "Dragon Vent" in the south-west Indian Ocean when they found yeti crabs, sea cucumbers and snails living around the volcanic underwater vents.

According to Dr. Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton who led the expedition said the animals are unique to the region and hasn't been seen in neighboring parts of the ocean.

"We found a new type of yeti crab. Yeti crabs are known at vents in the Eastern Pacific and there are two species described so far, but they have very long, hairy arms - ours have short arms and their undersides are covered in bristles.

They're quite different to the ones that are known from the Pacific," said Copley. "This is the first time a Yeti crab has been seen in the Indian Ocean."

The team also found sea cucumbers, vent shrimps and scaly-foot snails. Sea cucumbers have been previously found at deep sea vents in the Eastern Pacific. This is the first time they've been seen at vents in the Indian Ocean.

Deep-sea vents are fissures in the ocean floor that spew out hot, mineral-rich water. Despite the high temperatures, many species thrive at hydrothermal vents.

The Southampton team were interested in the vents on the South West Indian Ridge because they link back to the Mid Atlantic Ridge and the Central Indian Ridge where deep sea life has been recorded.

This part of the volcanic ridge is also unusual because it's less volcanically active so hydrothermal vents are fewer and more scattered.

The expedition set off from Cape Town on November 7 and returned to South Africa on December 21. The team explored the Dragon Vent for three days and took hundreds of samples of 17 different creatures.

The specimens are now being examined through morphological and genetic testing to determine if they are new species.

Exploring the hydrothermal vents are important because they offer a variety of species that have never been seen before.

"Just like the 19th century naturalists used to go to the Galápagos and other islands to find species there that are different to elsewhere and then use that to understand patterns of dispersal of dispersal and evolution, we can use deep-sea vents to do the same things beneath the waves," Copley said.

"And we need to do that because the exploitation of the deep ocean is overtaking its exploration. We're fishing in deeper and deeper waters, oil and gas is moving into deeper waters and now there's mining starting to take place in deep waters.

We need to understand how species disperse and evolve in the deep oceans if we're going to make responsible decisions about managing their resources."

Complex organic molecules on surface of Pluto

New evidence of complex organic molecules has been spotted in the surface of Pluto by the Hubble Space Telescope, a study has found.

Scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, found that substances on the dwarf planet's surface are absorbing more ultraviolet light than expected.

These substances could be organic and made up of complex hydrocarbons or nitrogen-containing molecules.

Study leader Alan Stern believes the research could explain Pluto's colour. It is thought that the chemical species could be produced by the interaction of cosmic rays with surface ice.

"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy colour," he said.

Probe New Horizons was launched in 2006 to make the first ever visit by space craft to the planet, which is one third of the size of Earth's moon. The probe will pass within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet in July 2015.

Pluto was re-defined as a dwarf planet inl 2006, when the International Astronomical Union found that it failed to meet the third criteria to be classed as a planet - to have become gravitationally dominant within its orbit.

MARS Rover Curiosity: Astrobiologists Claim Parts Of Mars May Be Habitable

Astrobiological researchers have discovered significant regions below the surface of Mars that could be habitable for Earth-based life.

“Our models tell us that if there is water present in the Martian sub-surface then it could be habitable – as an extensive region of the subsurface is at temperatures and pressures comfortable for terrestrial life,” said the lead author Eriita Jones in a press release.

Their research, which is published today in the journal Astrobiology, could serve as a guide to future Martian exploration missions that are looking for indigenous Martian life.

However, current Mars rovers don’t have the capability to dig deep enough to test the researchers’ findings.

In an earlier paper, the same researchers applied a statistical technique to the Earth to determine where life existed on Earth and where it didn’t.

They then used the techniques from that earlier study and applied them to Mars. What they found is that about 3% of the total volume of Mars is capable of supporting Earth-based lifeforms.

That may not sound like a lot – until you consider that only 1% of the Earth’s volume is inhabited.

It will be interesting to see if future generations of Martian rovers will have the capability to follow up on this research.

I’d be curious to see if the new rover, Curiosity, will be near one of the regions that these researchers uncovered. One of that rover’s goal is to look for ideal places for future rover missions to search for life.

If Curiosity is able to find any signs of life at all near regions identified in this paper, that would make it an excellent roadmap for future Martian missions.

Veteran Mars Researcher Says Viking Detected Life on Mars

NASA has repeatedly stated that its new mission to Mars, Curiosity, carries no life detector.

Yet, Gilbert V. Levin, Experimenter on NASA's 1976 Viking Mission, disagrees.

He says instruments aboard Curiosity can confirm his published claim that his Labeled Release (LR) experiment detected living microorganisms on Mars.

Dr. Levin was Experimenter and Dr. Patricia Ann Straat Co-Experimenter on the experiment that produced evidence of life on Mars.

Because another Viking instrument failed to find organic matter, the stuff of life, NASA discounted the LR results. Since Viking, Mars missions have sought only evidence of habitability, not life itself.

Levin now claims the organic analyzers and the high-resolution camera on Curiosity as his "stealth life detectors."

After twenty years of analyzing the LR data, reviewing flaws in Viking's organic detector, and studying new information on life obtained from Mars and Earth, Levin finally announced his "life claim" in a 1997 publication.

today, he said that, should Curiosity detect organic matter, the last obstacle to his claim to life on Mars will vanish. Co-Experimenter Straat agrees with Levin, saying, "I look forward to Curiosity data that may confirm our life interpretation of the LR."

Levin's other "virtual experiment" is Curiosity's high-resolution camera. It might determine whether "lichen-like" colored patches Levin found on rocks at the Viking sites might be living organisms.

Patricia Straat, and JPL's William Benton assisted him in the study which subjected images of the Mars rocks and terrestrial rocks bearing lichen to the Viking Imaging System.

Visible and infrared spectral analyses found the same responses from the Mars and terrestrial images (Levin, G. V., P. A. Straat and W. D. Benton, "Color and Feature Changes at Mars Viking Lander Site," J. Theoret. Biol., 75, 381-390, 1978 - available at gillevin.com, tab "Mars Research").

Levin has now written Dr. Mike Malin, designer of Curiosity's camera, asking him to seek and take high-resolution pictures of any such patches, hoping to determine whether Viking found living organisms on the rocks.

Levin (see biog. gillevin.com) started his Mars life-seeking efforts in 1958. Funded by NASA, he began developing the LR. In 1969, NASA appointed Levin as Team Member of the IRIS experiment aboard the 1971 Mariner 9 Mars orbiter. Dr. Straat joined that effort in 1970. They sought organic gases in the Martian atmosphere.

None were found, but recent observers of Mars have claimed detecting methane, possibly of microbial origin. Following Viking, Levin was appointed Team Member of NASA's MOx experiment aboard the Russian '96 Mission to Mars, converting that soil analysis instrument to give it life detection capability. However, the spacecraft crashed after launch.

"This is a very exciting time," says Levin, now an adjunct professor at Arizona State University, Tempe, "something for which I have been waiting for years. At the very least, the Curiosity results may bring about my long-requested re-evaluation of the Viking LR results."

SETI: Rethinking the Search for Alien 'Footprints'

Any intelligent extraterrestrial life that exists probably won't announce itself by blowing up the White House, or win over the hearts of children as a lovable alien with a glowing finger.

Many scientists simply hope to find evidence of them by scanning the skies for a radio signal from a distant star's alien civilization but such efforts may also risk overlooking clues of past alien activity right here on Earth.

If aliens did leave their mark on Earth by some wild chance, we could search for the possible "footprints" of alien technology or even analyze the DNA of terrestrial organisms for signs of intelligent messages or tinkering.

Such a CSI-style forensics search could complement, rather than replace, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomers who continue to look skyward, said Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.

"My proposals aim to spread the burden from a small band of heroic radio astronomers to the entire scientific community," Davies said. "Projects like genomic SETI are an attempt to complement radio SETI, not undermine it."

Scottish Scientists step towards bringing life to inorganic matter

All life on Earth is carbon-based, which has led to the widespread assumption that any other life that may exist in the universe would also be carbon-based.

Excluding the possibility of elements other than carbon forming the basis of life is often referred to as carbon chauvinism.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow are looking to overcome this bias and provide new insights into evolution by attempting to create “life” from carbon-free, inorganic chemicals.

They’ve now taken the first tentative steps towards this goal with the creation of inorganic-chemical-cells, or iCHELLS.

Prof Cronin says the current theory of evolution is really a special theory of evolution because it only applies only to organic biology. He says that if he and his team are successful in creating life from inorganic matter, it could lead to a general theory of evolution.

"The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties that could help us understand how life emerged and also to use this approach to define a new technology based upon evolution in the material world - a kind of inorganic living technology," said Prof Cronin.

"If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it's not just a biological process.

It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design."



Prof Cronin gave a talk at TED Global earlier this year in Edinburgh where he said that if his team is successful in creating life while taking carbon out of the equation, it might reveal what other elements might be capable of producing life elsewhere in the universe and provide NASA with a better idea of what to look for in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The University of Glasgow team's paper "Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells: iCHELLs' is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

NASA Detects Metabolic Precursors in Meteorite Dust

Dr. Cooper analyzes meteoritic material by injecting samples into gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer. 

This instrument separates very complicated molecular mixtures into individual compounds that are more easily identified.

Image credit: NASA

NASA scientists have found organic compounds associated with cellular respiration in carbonaceous meteorites, and simulated space-like conditions in the laboratory to determine how the compounds could have formed in deep space billions of years ago.

The compounds belong to newly discovered classes of compounds in meteorites, specifically keto acids, hydroxy tricarboxylic acids and tricarboxylic acids, some of which are members of the citric acid cycle.

This cycle is part of a process in which living cells break down organic fuel molecules in the presence of oxygen to harvest the energy they need to grow and divide.

This metabolic process occurs in most plants, animals, fungi, and many bacteria. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that a variety of organic compounds delivered to Earth by carbonaceous meteorites may have played a role in the origin and/or evolution of biochemical pathways.

Previously, most members of the citric acid cycle had not been identified in extraterrestrial sources.

"Some apparently ancient and critical metabolic pathways require a suite of compounds, of which a few are very fragile.

For such compounds to have survived this long in meteorites, they would have required either a continuous energetic production, or simply very low temperatures to preserve them," said George Cooper, research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

The findings were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although many water-soluble organic compounds have been detected in carbonaceous meteorites, they never included keto acids and compounds similar to citric acid – some of which are critically important to biological processes, such as glycolysis and the citric acid cycle. These processes are considered among the earliest in the evolution of life.

"Once we identified such fragile members, like the keto acids, we started to create scenarios for how they could have formed billions of years ago, and we then tested our assumptions in the laboratory," said Cooper.

As part of the research, scientists used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to analyse extracts of multiple carbonaceous meteorites, including Murchison, Murray and Allan Hills.

"We won’t know how significant our findings really are in terms of understanding pre-biological processes on early Earth, until we see more evidence from other disciplines, like astronomy, and geology. This might take a while," said Cooper.

The research was funded by NASA's Astrobiology Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program in Washington, D.C.

Additional information and images are available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html

Extreme Life on Earth Could Survive on Mars

Extreme Life on Earth Could Survive on Mars, Too


The Lost Hammer Spring on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada, may be even more inhospitable than some places on Mars. Yet it hosts microbial life, scientists found. Credit: Dept. of Microbiology, McGill University, Montreal

A new discovery of bacterial life in a Martian-like environment on Earth suggests our neighboring red planet could also be hospitable to some form of microbial life.

Researchers found methane-eating bacteria that appear to be thriving in a unique spring called Lost Hammer on Axel Heiberg Island in the extreme north of Canada.

This spring is similar to possible past or present springs on Mars, the scientists say, so it hints that microbial life could potentially exist there, too. There is no firm evidence that Mars does or ever did host life, however.

The Lost Hammer spring is extremely salty – so much so that the water doesn't freeze, even though temperatures are below freezing. The water has no consumable oxygen in it, but there are big bubbles of methane that rise to the surface.