… as we always knew the denizens of fishing villages are tough. Seems a recent experiment done on the ISS indicates a certain cyanobacterium found in the rocks near a UK fishing village can survive in space for better than 500 days.
Researchers suggest (see the attached video) one interesting thing about this is cyanobacteria have obvious potential uses for gas recycling. Stick ‘em under sunlight in an appropriately arranged system, you can turn your CO2 back into O2. Which has obvious utility…
Another comment briefly touches on panspermia. And this, I must confess, I find interesting, but hardly a slam dunk…
As in: yes, there’ve been suggestions previously that the ability of certain bacteria to take on a dormant spore form that can survive in conditions as hostile as this for some time might mean it’s not so wacky to imagine that life can actually seed itself between star systems…
To this, all I can say is: ‘kay, but a year and a half isn’t generally going to get you between star systems. Nor is it even much of a fraction, really, of the time you would need. So call it a step in that direction, a suggestive little factoid, I guess.
Still. Impressive. Tough little bugs, no question.
Researchers suggest (see the attached video) one interesting thing about this is cyanobacteria have obvious potential uses for gas recycling. Stick ‘em under sunlight in an appropriately arranged system, you can turn your CO2 back into O2. Which has obvious utility…
Another comment briefly touches on panspermia. And this, I must confess, I find interesting, but hardly a slam dunk…
As in: yes, there’ve been suggestions previously that the ability of certain bacteria to take on a dormant spore form that can survive in conditions as hostile as this for some time might mean it’s not so wacky to imagine that life can actually seed itself between star systems…
To this, all I can say is: ‘kay, but a year and a half isn’t generally going to get you between star systems. Nor is it even much of a fraction, really, of the time you would need. So call it a step in that direction, a suggestive little factoid, I guess.
Still. Impressive. Tough little bugs, no question.
As you may have heard from like a few thousand sources, one of the Kepler team scientists gave a conference about a week back in which they stated Kepler has, among its current confirmation targets, some 140 planets that are Earthish in size.
This isn’t, actually, so much a huge surprise. In a sense, it’s more a confirmation of what you might expect. Insofar as (a) our solar system has a few of those (broadly speaking, all the terrestrial planets, Mercury to Mars), and (b) planetary systems seem pretty common in general (see the exoplanet results of the past few years), but (c) our detectors ‘til now were generally heavily biased toward finding larger gassy blobs that make a more easily measurable dent in their parent stars’ detected outputs.
So Kepler, having solved that latter problem, confirms what you might expect: our system isn’t so unusual. Now that we can see small rocks, we’re confirming: yep, they’re there. In droves, even.
Still, yes, it’s exciting. Previous statements repeated, and saying the obvious: next job, start working on the techniques and instruments that get spectra off those vastly smaller and trickier surfaces, toward getting surface/atmospheric compositions. Then the science to try to sift out the places where the chemical mixes found are suggestive of biotic processes actively shuttling electrons ‘round, in ways abiotic processes would be unlikely to explain…
It’s gonna be a busy decade, methinks. And quite possibly an incredibly interesting one. I am increasingly pleased to have lived to see it.
This isn’t, actually, so much a huge surprise. In a sense, it’s more a confirmation of what you might expect. Insofar as (a) our solar system has a few of those (broadly speaking, all the terrestrial planets, Mercury to Mars), and (b) planetary systems seem pretty common in general (see the exoplanet results of the past few years), but (c) our detectors ‘til now were generally heavily biased toward finding larger gassy blobs that make a more easily measurable dent in their parent stars’ detected outputs.
So Kepler, having solved that latter problem, confirms what you might expect: our system isn’t so unusual. Now that we can see small rocks, we’re confirming: yep, they’re there. In droves, even.
Still, yes, it’s exciting. Previous statements repeated, and saying the obvious: next job, start working on the techniques and instruments that get spectra off those vastly smaller and trickier surfaces, toward getting surface/atmospheric compositions. Then the science to try to sift out the places where the chemical mixes found are suggestive of biotic processes actively shuttling electrons ‘round, in ways abiotic processes would be unlikely to explain…
It’s gonna be a busy decade, methinks. And quite possibly an incredibly interesting one. I am increasingly pleased to have lived to see it.
22/07: More blogroll changes
Two of the Sciblogs diaspora—Bora Zivkovic (Coturnix/A Blog Around the Clock) and Blake Stacey (Science After Sunclipse) are on the sidebar now.
Mostly because I have been reminded a bit by recent events how worth reading they both are. For vastly different reasons. And because, following that realization, I have found myself doing so.
So this is not, incidentally, to be taken as any particular staking of a position on the ongoing Sb thing. In case anyone cares. Tho’ I will say this much: I do not so much think they were wrong. Nor is PZ, necessarily, for sticking and trying to make it work.
I mean, honestly, yeah, expanding that a teensy bit: I think I might be a smidge uncomfortable working for that organization, following a few recent revelations/developments. But then, honestly, I’ve worked for lots of folks made me vastly more uncomfortable…
Not that, come to think of it, that’s any kind of real recommendation. But still: working with what you’ve got, imperfect as it may be, maybe trying with what you’ve got to make it a bit better, well, honestly, that’s generally the way of the world, too. Judgment call, as always, and the eternal question: is this a dog’s breakfast of oncoming drama I’m better off flushing, or can this thing be made to work, occasionally ugly tho’ it now may be…
Anyway: again, in case anyone cares. And that’s all on that, for now, and possibly forever. So as you were. And read Bora ‘n Blake. They’re good people.
Mostly because I have been reminded a bit by recent events how worth reading they both are. For vastly different reasons. And because, following that realization, I have found myself doing so.
So this is not, incidentally, to be taken as any particular staking of a position on the ongoing Sb thing. In case anyone cares. Tho’ I will say this much: I do not so much think they were wrong. Nor is PZ, necessarily, for sticking and trying to make it work.
I mean, honestly, yeah, expanding that a teensy bit: I think I might be a smidge uncomfortable working for that organization, following a few recent revelations/developments. But then, honestly, I’ve worked for lots of folks made me vastly more uncomfortable…
Not that, come to think of it, that’s any kind of real recommendation. But still: working with what you’ve got, imperfect as it may be, maybe trying with what you’ve got to make it a bit better, well, honestly, that’s generally the way of the world, too. Judgment call, as always, and the eternal question: is this a dog’s breakfast of oncoming drama I’m better off flushing, or can this thing be made to work, occasionally ugly tho’ it now may be…
Anyway: again, in case anyone cares. And that’s all on that, for now, and possibly forever. So as you were. And read Bora ‘n Blake. They’re good people.
23/06: Field in waiting
So the SciBorg’s Dynamics of Cats had a piece a few days ago on a particularly intriguing puzzle—or two possibly related puzzles—about Titan’s atmosphere:
1) There’s no acetylene present, and you’d generally expect it in a hydrocarbon soup like you find on Titan, and
2) There’s evidence of a molecular hydrogen flux down to the surface from higher in the atmosphere. As in: it looks like H2 is moving downward to the surface, and disappearing there. (As opposed to the expected flux outward—as energetic individual instances of this very light molecule escape the moon’s gravitational pull entirely.)
… this is suggestive for the following reasons: (3) acetylene would make a very good energy source for methane-based life on said moon, and (4) molecular hydrogen would be one of the best molecules for filling a key role in the process—acting much as oxygen acts here*, in aerobic metabolic processes…
So one explanation for both these oddities is: some kind of life (not much like we know it, but not wildly beyond our imaginations, either) is on the surface, and doing exactly that.
It’s obviously not the only explanation—there are (also theoretical) non-biological reactions that could do this, too. Still, it’s interesting, well worth a look. The NASA release is here.
It got me thinking, again, too, about something I said earlier about the search for extraterrestrial life. That is: it is very likely the first life we find won’t be beaming out radio waves. If you’d looked at our own planet at any random instant during its existence so far, you would have been very, very unlikely to find so obvious a signature as such a transmission, because there have only been radio transmitters for the last several decades—a blink of the eye in billions of years…
But for much of that time, you would have seen atmospheric gas mixes that would suggest life—especially the huge amounts of molecular oxygen that have been ‘round in abundance since photosynthesis really got going…
Saying what anyone reading this far probably already knows: that’s a real tell, that one—molecular oxygen is very reactive—tho’ the element oxygen is fairly common in the universe, you really don’t generally see it in its molecular form in abundance in a planetary atmosphere. You need something actively breaking it off the stuff it would otherwise stick to for that to happen. In our case, that’s life, and that’s the green plants and the algae doing that, so if we see that somewhere else, we’re probably going to think: life. And I’d think that’d be a pretty reasonable assumption.
But that’s not the only thing we’re likely to see, either. Odd things like we’re seeing on Titan, those are yet another possibility. And I’m betting as the exoplanet catalogue grows, and as we start getting techniques and instruments that more regularly yield spectra (and thus guesses at atmosphere and surface composition) off those, we’re going to start racking up oddities.
So here’s to a field in waiting: the search for extraterrestrial life—not necessarily (or even probably) intelligent, but still well worth spotting.
1) There’s no acetylene present, and you’d generally expect it in a hydrocarbon soup like you find on Titan, and
2) There’s evidence of a molecular hydrogen flux down to the surface from higher in the atmosphere. As in: it looks like H2 is moving downward to the surface, and disappearing there. (As opposed to the expected flux outward—as energetic individual instances of this very light molecule escape the moon’s gravitational pull entirely.)
… this is suggestive for the following reasons: (3) acetylene would make a very good energy source for methane-based life on said moon, and (4) molecular hydrogen would be one of the best molecules for filling a key role in the process—acting much as oxygen acts here*, in aerobic metabolic processes…
So one explanation for both these oddities is: some kind of life (not much like we know it, but not wildly beyond our imaginations, either) is on the surface, and doing exactly that.
It’s obviously not the only explanation—there are (also theoretical) non-biological reactions that could do this, too. Still, it’s interesting, well worth a look. The NASA release is here.
It got me thinking, again, too, about something I said earlier about the search for extraterrestrial life. That is: it is very likely the first life we find won’t be beaming out radio waves. If you’d looked at our own planet at any random instant during its existence so far, you would have been very, very unlikely to find so obvious a signature as such a transmission, because there have only been radio transmitters for the last several decades—a blink of the eye in billions of years…
But for much of that time, you would have seen atmospheric gas mixes that would suggest life—especially the huge amounts of molecular oxygen that have been ‘round in abundance since photosynthesis really got going…
Saying what anyone reading this far probably already knows: that’s a real tell, that one—molecular oxygen is very reactive—tho’ the element oxygen is fairly common in the universe, you really don’t generally see it in its molecular form in abundance in a planetary atmosphere. You need something actively breaking it off the stuff it would otherwise stick to for that to happen. In our case, that’s life, and that’s the green plants and the algae doing that, so if we see that somewhere else, we’re probably going to think: life. And I’d think that’d be a pretty reasonable assumption.
But that’s not the only thing we’re likely to see, either. Odd things like we’re seeing on Titan, those are yet another possibility. And I’m betting as the exoplanet catalogue grows, and as we start getting techniques and instruments that more regularly yield spectra (and thus guesses at atmosphere and surface composition) off those, we’re going to start racking up oddities.
So here’s to a field in waiting: the search for extraterrestrial life—not necessarily (or even probably) intelligent, but still well worth spotting.
*ETA: Commenter mswzebo points out that this description is a bit confusing/inaccurate, insofar as in the theoretical process we’re talking about on Titan, you’d expect H2 would be a reducer, not an oxidizer (as O2 is here). The comment about hydrogen gas’ role came from one C. McKay, who wrote the paper describing the theoretical metabolism, and as there’s a PDF of the paper online, this is confirmed therein: in the reaction in question, H2 is the reducer. There’s also similar phrasing in the paper, however: looks like McKay was just speaking in the sense of H2 being an abundant gas in the atmosphere which, when added to the food source/fuel in question (acetylene), allows the energy-yielding reaction driving the (again, theoretical) metabolic question in process… As in: food + O2 = energy for life, here, acetylene + H2 might equal the same thing on Titan.
21/06: Kepler comes through
(Alternate title withheld due to expletive content)
… and comes through in a big way. NASA issued a release last week providing data on more than 300 new exoplanets found by Kepler’s very sensitive detectors, some dozen or so of which are super-Earths ‘round the size of Corot 7b…
… and announced they’re holding data already on an additional 400 or so they want to vet a bit more closely, for a little longer than usual, a fact which has a few folk mildly upset. Broad hints are: that additional set contains more smallish and smaller targets, somepossibly* down ‘round one Earth mass.
I’m not gonna say much more right now about it. Insofar as I’m a bit busy both on a personal life level and, once I get through that, am gonna have to do some hard archive trawling to work out whatinhell all this stuff means. Three hundred-plus is a lot of targets, essentially doubling our current catalogue of exoplanets. The additional four hundred is gonna put us well over a thousand, total.
Right. So that sound you just heard was the world changing. In case you were wondering.
(*Scratch ‘possibly’. I think you can assume there are such candidates, as Natalie Batalha, one of the Kepler team, has said so. They’re probably none-too-well confirmed at this point, however.)
… and comes through in a big way. NASA issued a release last week providing data on more than 300 new exoplanets found by Kepler’s very sensitive detectors, some dozen or so of which are super-Earths ‘round the size of Corot 7b…
… and announced they’re holding data already on an additional 400 or so they want to vet a bit more closely, for a little longer than usual, a fact which has a few folk mildly upset. Broad hints are: that additional set contains more smallish and smaller targets, some
I’m not gonna say much more right now about it. Insofar as I’m a bit busy both on a personal life level and, once I get through that, am gonna have to do some hard archive trawling to work out whatinhell all this stuff means. Three hundred-plus is a lot of targets, essentially doubling our current catalogue of exoplanets. The additional four hundred is gonna put us well over a thousand, total.
Right. So that sound you just heard was the world changing. In case you were wondering.
(*Scratch ‘possibly’. I think you can assume there are such candidates, as Natalie Batalha, one of the Kepler team, has said so. They’re probably none-too-well confirmed at this point, however.)
The Soviet Lunokhod lunar rover missions were cooly weird. Steampunk, almost. Solar-powered, heated by scary chunks of Polonium-210, looked a lot like bathtubs with dish antennae and solar panels stickin’ off ‘em at weird angles. Agatha Heterodyne woulda loved ‘em…
Today’s cool news: the somewhat-lost Lunokhod 2 rover and its track have now been spotted in some LRO images…
(Somewhat lost because: it was only ever sorta lost. Its laser ranging reflector thingy was still working even after it got stuck in a crater and overheated, but what with there being no real way to line up the signature bouncing back from that with maps and photos, and the generally rough quality of lunar cartography in the early 70s when the thing was driving around up there, its precise location remained a mystery some decades. Anyway…)
Anyway, in the LRO stuff, you can actually see it reasonably clearly. Tracks show up as two lines, the rover itself as a sorta dark smudge. Generally cool.
Today’s cool news: the somewhat-lost Lunokhod 2 rover and its track have now been spotted in some LRO images…
(Somewhat lost because: it was only ever sorta lost. Its laser ranging reflector thingy was still working even after it got stuck in a crater and overheated, but what with there being no real way to line up the signature bouncing back from that with maps and photos, and the generally rough quality of lunar cartography in the early 70s when the thing was driving around up there, its precise location remained a mystery some decades. Anyway…)
Anyway, in the LRO stuff, you can actually see it reasonably clearly. Tracks show up as two lines, the rover itself as a sorta dark smudge. Generally cool.
GJ 1214b, 40 ly distant, discovery announced last Wednesday, probably has a nickel iron core and water oceans. So it sounds familiar…
But it’s probably also got a surface temperature of around 200˚C, a mass around six times the Earth’s, some three quarters of which is water…
And it orbits a little red thingy (GJ 1214, natch, in Ophiuchus) with a period of around 1.6 days, meaning it’s very close to said primary—semimajor axis something like 0.014 AU…
So no, there pretty much definitely isn’t going to be anything solid poking up above those hot, deep seas. But still, like I said: sounds familiar. This really is a pretty close cousin to our own globe. Hotter and larger, but made out of essentially the same stuff.
And the really cool thing, beyond that it was found with sensitive ground-based techniques: whatever is in its atmosphere, we should know pretty soon. At 40 ly, spectroscopic work aimed at working that out can be underway just as soon as someone can swing a space-based scope that way. And we’ve got a few that are up to it.
So, no exaggeration, this really is something of a ‘ZOMG’ moment, if one that’s been coming a while. The rough guess from what little anyone here knows is: life like we know doesn’t really seem that likely in such an environment. But honestly, me and probably a lot of other people are going to be paying pretty close attention to those spectral studies, once the observers start reporting. This is a really interesting little globe, all of a sudden.
(Nature letter here, pop coverage all over the place, of course.)
But it’s probably also got a surface temperature of around 200˚C, a mass around six times the Earth’s, some three quarters of which is water…
And it orbits a little red thingy (GJ 1214, natch, in Ophiuchus) with a period of around 1.6 days, meaning it’s very close to said primary—semimajor axis something like 0.014 AU…
So no, there pretty much definitely isn’t going to be anything solid poking up above those hot, deep seas. But still, like I said: sounds familiar. This really is a pretty close cousin to our own globe. Hotter and larger, but made out of essentially the same stuff.
And the really cool thing, beyond that it was found with sensitive ground-based techniques: whatever is in its atmosphere, we should know pretty soon. At 40 ly, spectroscopic work aimed at working that out can be underway just as soon as someone can swing a space-based scope that way. And we’ve got a few that are up to it.
So, no exaggeration, this really is something of a ‘ZOMG’ moment, if one that’s been coming a while. The rough guess from what little anyone here knows is: life like we know doesn’t really seem that likely in such an environment. But honestly, me and probably a lot of other people are going to be paying pretty close attention to those spectral studies, once the observers start reporting. This is a really interesting little globe, all of a sudden.
(Nature letter here, pop coverage all over the place, of course.)
29/10: Over 400
News from the big black—as of a day or two ago—when an ESO team announced they’d sifted out some 32 additional candidates using the HARPS (a spectrographic tool)—the catalogue of known/suspected exoplanets passed 400…
Fun detail from the ESO announcement: they found several gas giants around metal-poor stars—previously thought to be relatively unlikely places to find planetary systems, since they have relatively low concentrations of the heavy elements around which and out of which planets might be expected to coalesce.
Upshot: the little blighters are everywhere. I swear I’m starting to suspect the missing dark matter is baryonic after all… and mostly in the form of hot, green alien women.
Fun detail from the ESO announcement: they found several gas giants around metal-poor stars—previously thought to be relatively unlikely places to find planetary systems, since they have relatively low concentrations of the heavy elements around which and out of which planets might be expected to coalesce.
Upshot: the little blighters are everywhere. I swear I’m starting to suspect the missing dark matter is baryonic after all… and mostly in the form of hot, green alien women.
In news of the odd, a University of Chicago geneticist may have died from the plague the weekend before last.
The strain of Y. pestis he was studying is supposed to lack the stuff that can make the bug a killer, and is generally thought to be safe, so you don’t normally have to take any special precautions working with it. Current guesses are either he had some underlying condition that weakened him, or the bug wasn’t quite the approved standard-issue after all…
Weirdness: he was handling it because he was studying its genetics. File under ‘nature has an incredibly nasty sense of humour’ if the damned thing somehow evolved some nasty pathogenic quality right under his nose, while he was sequencing it, and managed to kill him.
The strain of Y. pestis he was studying is supposed to lack the stuff that can make the bug a killer, and is generally thought to be safe, so you don’t normally have to take any special precautions working with it. Current guesses are either he had some underlying condition that weakened him, or the bug wasn’t quite the approved standard-issue after all…
Weirdness: he was handling it because he was studying its genetics. File under ‘nature has an incredibly nasty sense of humour’ if the damned thing somehow evolved some nasty pathogenic quality right under his nose, while he was sequencing it, and managed to kill him.
09/09: Rodents of unusual size?
I don’t believe they exist…
Okay, so: so far, the Bosavi Wooly Rat has not attacked Cary Elwes, nor, in fact, shown much interest whatsoever in humans (insofar as, previously, it probably hadn’t met any… who knows how long this attitude will persist now that it has). But still, it’s quite the impressive critter all in its own right. It and the Bosavi Silky Cuscus, Bosavi Camouflaged Gecko and the Fanged Frog of Bosavi—and no, I’m not making this up. Honest.
Go. Read. Press is comparing it to The Lost World, and the find really isn’t so far off that. A 1 km deep volcanic crater in the middle of a jungle, and within, species never before seen.
Okay, so: so far, the Bosavi Wooly Rat has not attacked Cary Elwes, nor, in fact, shown much interest whatsoever in humans (insofar as, previously, it probably hadn’t met any… who knows how long this attitude will persist now that it has). But still, it’s quite the impressive critter all in its own right. It and the Bosavi Silky Cuscus, Bosavi Camouflaged Gecko and the Fanged Frog of Bosavi—and no, I’m not making this up. Honest.
Go. Read. Press is comparing it to The Lost World, and the find really isn’t so far off that. A 1 km deep volcanic crater in the middle of a jungle, and within, species never before seen.
