Snowing with Microbes on Enceladus?

Aside from ancient Mars, the moons of Saturn might be one of the best places to look for life outside this planet. The methane lakes of Titan are promising places, but so are the spewing plumes of ice on Enceladus — and the latter would be an easy one to check, as it turns out. The Cassini orbiter just flew through them, and Cassini scientists want to go back and take a longer look.

Cassini has been examining Enceladus‘ ghostly, icy plumes for several years now, tasting the water, ice and organic material flying out of them. (Organic meaning carbon-based compounds, not necessarily living material.) The plumes are also piping hot, at least in distant solar system terms — about -120 degrees F, which equates to lots of thermal energy. And perhaps the most tantalizing part? The icy particles are salty, possessing the same salinity as Earth’s oceans.

Enceladus might have a vast interior sea, and it also has an energy source in the form of massive tidal forces courtesy of its planet. Saturn’s wrenching gravitational pull flexes Enceladus’ interior, generating heat. Heat and salty water sounds a lot like environments on Earth — like subterranean microbe communities in places like Yellowstone, or perhaps the thriving ecosystems that exist in hydrothermal vents in the absence of sunlight. Could Enceladus host any such life forms?

Enceladus Jets Dramatic plumes spray water ice from many locations near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. More than 30 individual jets of different sizes can be seen in this image captured during a flyby from NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Nov. 21, 2009. NASA/Cassini Imaging Science Team

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It would be fairly simple to find out, according to Carolyn Porco, a renowned Cassini scientist and leader of the spacecraft’s imaging science team. All you’d need to do is fly by and take a whiff.

“It sounds crazy, but it could be snowing microbes on the surface of this little world,” she says in an interview with NASA’s science news portal. “It’s the most promising place I know of for an astrobiology search. We don't even need to go scratching around on the surface. We can fly through the plume and sample it. Or we can land on the surface, look up and stick our tongues out.  And voilà…we have what we came for.”

Simply flying through the plume would be easier than designing an interplanetary boat, at least.

 Enceladus: Cassini flew just 46 miles above Enceladus' south pole on March 27, 2012, cruising right through the spewing plumes seen here. This image is from 2009.  NASA/Cassini Imaging Science Team

 Environment Clean Generations

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Posted in: enceladus,microbes,nasa

A Portion of Mars could be Friendly to Life

Sunrise at Gale Crater Gale Crater, future home of the Mars Science Laboratory, looms in the distance, distinguished from adjacent craters by its central mountain. Gale Crater straddles the dichotomy boundary of Mars, which separates the broad, flat, and young northern plains from the much older and rougher southern highlands. Water may have flowed across this topographic boundary, from highland to lowland. Last week, the Opportunity rover team found slam-dunk evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars, an intriguing find for astrobiology. NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Now that we have slam-dunk evidence that Mars was once a wet and likely temperate place, astrobiologists are pondering the implications for ancient Martian life. One new study says the Red Planet has even more habitable space than Earth — albeit underground.

Led by Charley Lineweaver at the Australian National University, researchers compared models of temperature and pressure conditions on Earth with those on Mars, extrapolating how much of Mars might be amenable to hosting Earth-like organisms. Life occupies just one percent of Earth, if you consider the entire planet’s volume from the core to the stratosphere. But apparently three percent of Mars could be habitable, Lineweaver said. Most of this comfortable space is underground, where there would be sufficient pressure and warmth to hold liquid water and perhaps some toasty microbes.



Although the Phoenix lander found ice at the north pole, modern Mars’ surface is too low-pressure to hold on to liquid water, and it’s too cold (average about -81 °F) for water or life as we know it. But nestled underneath the planet’s crust, the habitat could be much more friendly, Lineweaver told AFP.
Lineweaver said his study uses decades of data from a host of Mars missions and compiles information about several sites, rather than just one or two areas. “There are large regions of Mars that are compatible with terrestrial life,” he said.

The Mars Science Laboratory, en route to the planet for an August arrival, is designed to help answer some of these questions. It has several instruments for examining the chemical composition of rocks inside Gale Crater, a region believed to once host flowing water. The Curiosity rover also has some instruments designed to look for the chemical ingredients of life.

The Australian study was published in the journal Astrobiology.

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Posted in: life,mars,microbes,space

How Low Can Life Go?

• The byproducts of rock-eating microbes have been found pouring out of a hole in the sea floor
• The unidentified microbe that live in the rocks could be widespread in the oceans.
• How much these subterranean, submarine microbes contribute to the global carbon budget is still unknown. 

There is a thriving realm of mysterious microbes of potential importance to the global carbon budget hidden beneath the sea floor near where the Earth's crust is being pulled apart, according to new evidence from deep-sea explorers.

In the frigid depths of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, warm water moving through the sea floor near the plate edges has been found loaded with dissolved organic matter with a telltale carbon signature that could have only come from microbes in the rocks.

The warm waters were captured as they poured from an old bore-hole and into the freezing waters, and were double-checked for contamination by comparing them to waters obtained from sterile, specially made samplers that were driven into the sea floor.

"It looks like a massive fire hose," said Matthew McCarthy of the University of California at Santa Cruz, referring to the pressurized, 80-degree Fahrenheit groundwater spewing from the old hole in the sea bottom. McCarthy is one of the authors of a paper about the secrets of that groundwater, being published in the January issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The goal of the work, McCarthy explained, was to irrefutably show that the waters from the hole were representative of what lies much deeper, rather than just contaminated by the human activities that drilled the hole.

"If there was ever any contamination, it was long gone," McCarthy said of he and his colleagues conclusions.

Indeed, now the researchers have evidence of what is probably a vast volume of lava rocks going down to unknown depths which are loaded with microbes. Those microbes make their living by using reactions on the surface of basalt rocks that have been erupted over the millennia on the seafloor.

The microbes belong to a group called called chemo-litho-autotrophs that live without any connection to the more common Earth ecosystems which are dependent on sunlight.

Such microbial ecosystems could be widespread in the oceans. If they are, they could play an important and unknown role in the cycling of carbon in the deep seas, said McCarthy.

"If these kinds of reactions are happening at Juan de Fuca, chances they are happening at other places are very high," agreed researcher Katrina Edwards of the University of Southern California. "The potential is pretty widespread."

So far the actual identities of the microbes is unknown, said McCarthy. "Our data don't tell you about the microbes that made it," he said.

Although some microbes have been found, it's not clear they are the source of the dissolved organic carbon in the water.

As for how it fits into the Earth's carbon budget, that's still unknown, says Edwards. She likes to visualize the carbon budget as being made of many carbon cycles that are like gears of different sizes and turning at different speeds.

 

"This one is moving slowly and we don't know how big it is," she said of the deep sea, chemo-litho-autotroph carbon cycle.

One thing that will help to begin defining its size will be more work on other seafloor spreading centers. Edwards and her team are planning just that, with a new observatory slated to be installed on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in late 2011.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: chemo-litho-autotrophs,dead sea,life,microbes,ocean,water

Hydrogen - Cheaply and Quickly from Microbes

     Transport and storage of hydrogen as energy sources are vital for our future. A microbe's enzyme show how to produce hydrogen in a faster and cheaper way.

            The future of energy lies in transforming electrical energy into chemical energy that can be used again if necessary. The main problem is achieving this as fast and inexpensive enough to be a viable solution. 

            Wherever there is a source of energy, even in the comfort of your own home, hydrogen can be extracted from water. With a storage cell, it can be converted back into electricity. As long as the electricity needed for the process comes from renewable sources such as windmills or solar cells, it is a clean energy, hydrogen is a versatile energy carrier and can be made ​​from environmentally friendly sources such as wind or solar energy.

            Storage cells need a catalyst to accelerate chemical reactions for conversion of hydrogen to water and electricity. Platinum is excellent in this role, but is a very rare and expensive.

            Some microbes produce enzymes for billions of years, enzymes that can can take this role with cheap metals such as iron and nickel. The problem is that these enzymes are difficult to obtain and do not survive outside microbes. 

             Researchers have managed to create a synthetic version, more resistant to these enzymes. So far, managed to take the first step, uniting the two atoms of hydrogen extracted from water and generate hydrogen gas. Furthermore, the synthetic enzyme behaves even better than natural, is 10 times faster and produce 100,000 molecules of hydrogen gas every second.   

             However, despite the increased speed, the process consumes too much energy to be viable in practice. Even so, is a first step in obtaining low-cost hydrogen, using iron and nickel catalysts, according to the authors of the research. 

   

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Posted in: electricity,energy,enzymes,hydrogen,microbes

Panspermia-Moral Obligation or BioPollution

The speculative mechanism of panspermia could explain how life formed on Earth and how it might exist elsewhere in our solar system and beyond. Hitching rides on chunks of rock blasted into space by meteorite impacts or gliding through space on a comet, it turns out that "life as we know it" has an astonishing knack of surviving in the most extreme environments.

            But what if mankind could purposefully launch space probes packed with little biological "starter kits" toward star systems that appear to have the potential to nurture life? We have lots of life down here, isn't it our duty to spread our seed amongst the stars?

  

           Yes, says Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, in a paper submitted to an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cosmology. Before the rich biosphere of Earth is dead, Mautner believes that we need to ship Earth Brand™ biology to suitable adopted homes so our evolutionary line has a chance to gain a foothold elsewhere in the universe.

           "We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life," Mautner said. "Securing that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose."

           

            These are certainly lofty plans, but he proposes that we send a variety of basic organisms to "potentially fertile" worlds throughout the universe (to worlds from a few to over 500 light years away). Using early-Earth as an example, organisms like cyanobacteria could be sent to alien worlds to go into reproductive overdrive, feasting on toxic gases and releasing byproducts such as oxygen. 

            These little biological starter kits would support a brand new biosphere, helping more complex life forms to develop and evolve.

(Is anyone else thinking this was borrowed from the plot of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock?)

             In his paper, Mautner goes into some detail about what this galactic seeding mission would look like. As current launch costs are astonishingly high (using current technology, it costs $10,000 to get a one kilogram payload off the Earth's surface and into space), the space seeding pods would need to be small. But using tiny "pods" weighing only 0.1 grams, as many as 100,000 microorganisms could be accommodated to give a reasonable chance of success.

            Perhaps surprisingly, he indicates that we'd need "hundreds of tons" of biological material. But in this case, the launch costs would be a modest $1 billion; a bargain considering we'd be ensuring the continuation of Earth Brand™ life on various new worlds.

           All these plans are completely speculative however, and to put a cost on such a mission is fanciful at best. Although Prof. Mautner does a great job of identifying how we could go about flinging our seed to the furthermost reaches of the galaxy, I'd question the fundamental point of "directed panspermia" at all. Is it really our "moral responsibility"?

           I understand that we -- as life forms -- see the whole life thing as sacred, but what if one of these biological pods fertilizes a world where another life form is struggling to survive? Who are we to say that our Earth Brand™ life is superior to another brand of alien microbe? 

           If our life takes hold of a planet where another life had the opportunity to evolve into an interstellar civilization in a couple of billions of years time, wouldn't we be in violation of some kind of cosmic anti-monopoly regulation (or at least in violation of the Prime DIrective)?

       

           And there's another thing to ponder: What if "life" is the universal equivalent of some kind of infection. Is life rare because the universe has a very strong immune system? Firing our genetic code far and wide could be considered to be biological pollution. 

           I'm all for spreading the human influence around the galaxy, but I think this can only be considered if we physically go to these alien worlds, to evaluate these places in person before we start setting up home. Blindly sending life from Earth to habitable worlds and planet-forming accretion disks seems a little reckless, especially as we have no clue about the consequences if we started impregnating unsuspecting planets.

          I know these points are just as speculative as Mautner's paper, but it does make you wonder whether sending it into space is really a "moral responsibility" when we have little clue about who or what we are in the grand (cosmic) scale of things.

          Just because we've got it doesn't mean the rest of the universe wants it.

 by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: earth,microbes,panspermia

Weather Affected By Microbes

       Bacteria have been discovered in hailstones, with the highest concentrations of germs in the cores. Ice-nucleating bacteria in clouds could trigger snow and ice storms. Bacteria in cloud can also boost the production of a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming. 

               Bacteria often leave their hosts feeling under the weather. And even when the hosts are high-altitude parcels of air, microbes can be a source of inclement conditions, a Montana research team finds. Cloudborne bacteria might even pose climate threats by boosting the production of a greenhouse gas, another team proposes. Both groups reported their findings May 24 at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in New Orleans.

              These data add to a growing body of evidence that biological organisms are affecting clouds, notes Anthony Prenni of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, an atmospheric scientist who did not participate in the new studies. Right now, he cautions, “We still don’t know on a global scale how important these processes are.” But research into microbial impacts on weather and climate is really heating up, he adds, so “within a few years, I think we’re going to have a much better handle on it.”

             Alexander Michaud’s new research was triggered by a June storm that pummeled Montana State University’s campus in Bozeman last year with golf ball–sized and larger hailstones. The microbial ecologist normally studies subglacial aquatic environments in Antarctica. But after saving 27 of the hailstones, he says, “I suddenly realized, no one had really ever thought about studying hailstones — in a layered sense — for biology.”

             So his team dissected the icy balls, along with hundreds of smaller ones collected during a July hail storm south of campus. Michaud now reports finding germs throughout, with the highest concentrations by far — some 1,000 cells per milliliter of meltwater — in the hailstones’ cores.

             Since at least the 1980s, scientists have argued that some share of clouds, and their precipitation, likely traces to microbes. Their reasoning: Strong winds can loft germs many kilometers into the sky. And since the 1970s, agricultural scientists have recognized that certain compounds made by microbes serve as efficient water magnets around which ice crystals can form at relatively high temperatures (occasionally leading to frost devastation of crops).

                

         In 2008, Brent Christner of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and his colleagues reported isolating ice-nucleating bacteria from rain and snow. A year later, Prenni’s group found microbes associated with at least a third of the cloud ice crystals they sampled at an altitude of 8 kilometers.

         “But finding ice-nucleating bacteria in snow or hail is very different from saying they were responsible for the ice,” says Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I say that,” he admits, “even though as a microbiologist, I’d love to believe that bacteria control weather.”

                  Pure water molecules won’t freeze in air at temperatures above about –40 degrees Celsius, Christner notes. Add tiny motes of mineral dust or clay, and water droplets may coalesce around them — or nucleate — at perhaps –15 degrees. But certain bacteria can catalyze ice nucleation at even –2 degrees, he reported at the meeting in New Orleans.

                 Through chemical techniques, Michaud’s group determined that the ice nucleation in their hail occurred around –11.5 degrees for the June hailstones and at roughly –8.5 degrees for the July stones.

                 Michaud’s data on the role of microbes in precipitation “is pretty strong evidence,” Prenni says.

Also at the meeting, Pierre Amato of Clermont University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, reported biological activity in materials sampled from a cloud at an altitude of 1,500 meters. The air hosted many organic pollutants, including formaldehyde, acetate and oxalate. Sunlight can break these down to carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, something Amato’s group confirmed in the lab. But sunlight didn’t fully degrade some organics unless microbes were also present.

 

          Moreover, certain cloudborne bacteria — the French team identified at least 17 types — degraded organic pollutants to carbon dioxide at least as efficiently as the sun did. Amato’s team reported these findings online February 9 in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

           This microbial transformation of pollutants to carbon dioxide occurs even in darkness. Amato has calculated the total nighttime microbial production of carbon dioxide in clouds and pegs it “on the order of 1 million tons per year.” Though not a huge sum (equal to the carbon dioxide from perhaps 180,000 cars per year), he cautions that this amount could increase based on airborne pollutant levels, temperatures and microbial populations.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: microbes,water,weather