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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 31 2020, @04:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the feed-me! dept.

Bacteria live despite burial in seafloor mud for 100 million years:

You know those videos where people open (or even eat?) military rations from World War II? It's shocking to see just how well-preserved these "foods" can be after all those decades. In a way, Yuki Morono and his team of researchers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology flipped that experience around by giving modern food to some old organisms. But their case involved bringing up ancient mud from the seafloor and adding some food to see if anything was alive in there.

There were, in fact, bacteria in the mud, which likely doesn't sound surprising. But given the environment and the age of this stuff—100 million years—it's actually pretty remarkable.

[...] The thing is, the researchers don't think this is just modern bacteria that have made their way deep into the mud. In fact, they shouldn't be able to move at all in that mud. The average space between particles in the clay should be considerably smaller than the size of a bacterium. The presence of microbes in the oldest sediments represent communities that are about as old as the sediment itself, the researchers conclude.

[...] This leads to an extraordinary claim: "Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 [million years]."

[...] So if the researchers are right about what they've found, it's a testament to the fact that life is nothing if not persistent. By slowing down to live within extremely limited means, these bacterial communities may have survived for a simply incredible length of time.

Also At:
100 million-year-old life forms found on the ocean floor

Journal Reference:
Yuki Morono, Motoo Ito, Tatsuhiko Hoshino, et al. Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17330-1)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @08:55PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @08:55PM (#1029487)

    A straight white male in his 50s with Amy as VP would win in a landslide against Trump. But why did the Democrats think four geriatrics in their 70s were the answer?

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday August 01 2020, @03:34AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday August 01 2020, @03:34AM (#1029622) Journal

    But why did the Democrats think four geriatrics in their 70s were the answer?

    Power, pliability, and a lifetime of political favors in the bank. The Democratic Party has had a problem developing a younger generation of leaders for a long time. Younger progressives did keep trying to break in over the last twenty years, but the DNC froze them out. Howard Dean's voters, Kucinich's, and lately Bernie's have all tried to break in, but the Clintons and their DLC gang hated them. When Obama crushed Occupy Wall Street, I said it was a pity because it was going to be the last time the progressives in the party asked nicely for things to change, and that seems to have been born out.

    The result is the DNC is playing Weekend at Biden's while the younger people riot.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.