The vents are only mostly dead!

How is this news? Didn't we discover life on these same vents like two years ago?

How do you explain that, Mr. Scientist?

I'm changing my Fark handle to "Mr. Science-Pants"

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.

proof of the afterlife.
he has risen

/Approves

Fabric_Man: The vents are only mostly dead!

But the vents' last words were, "To blave."

FTA: The findings were published in an mBio article authored by Edwards, USC postdoctoral researcher Jason Sylvan and Brandy Toner of the University of Minnesota.

Looks like graduate school saved someone from being a stripper, or worse, an Epson sales rep. Or both.

/Hooray for extremophiles! Gave us PCR!

They just won't get on the damned cart.

LowbrowDeluxe: How is this news? Didn't we discover life on these same vents like two years ago?

I think the idea is that we used to think those lifeforms are reliant on heat and sulfur from the vents to survive, but now we've found that they can survive even the vents are dormant.

Those scientists better check their hypotenuses.

This info suggests that extremophiles on Mars could still be eking out a living in subsurface brines, hiding out from the UV radiation. If we can find them, the news will turn over millennia of human thought that we are the only life in the universe.
It will have profound effects on philosophy and religion, though little immediate practical effect. As a Catholic, I would find the info interesting but by no means confounding to my faith: the bible story of the creation was written by men, trying to interpret their world in a framework they could understand. That the mechanism for our formation could be more exotic and convoluted than breathing life into a clay homunculus is not a problem, it still gets to the end result of "us". And that's every bit as awe-inspiring as any other version of God creating us. God by definition can do anything, even things we can't imagine.

At this point we should just assume that everywhere has some microbe or bacteria hanging around.

/cold dead vent something something subby's mom

The tag would have been more appropriate.

lake_huron: FTA: The findings were published in an mBio article authored by Edwards, USC postdoctoral researcher Jason Sylvan and Brandy Toner of the University of Minnesota.

Looks like graduate school saved someone from being a stripper, or worse, an Epson sales rep. Or both.

/Hooray for extremophiles! Gave us PCR!

How do you think she paid for grad school?

A universe of death
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things
Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived.

/That's John Milton, not Intruder, esq.
//See also: Deep Hot Biosphere (new window).