Life Found Deep Under Antarctic Ice For First Time?

For the first time, scientists believe they have collected life-forms from deep under the Antarctic ice.

Last week, a team found and collected microbes in a lake hidden under more than a half-mile of ice. (Related: "Race Is On to Find Life Under Antarctic Ice.")

Among other things, the discovery may shed light on what lies under the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

The newfound life-forms have little connection to life on the earth's surface and many apparently survive by "eating rocks," team member Brent Christner said in an interview from the U.S. McMurdo Station, after spending several weeks working at a remote field site at Lake Whillans.

That may explain how life on other celestial objects—such as on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn—survive in the absence of available carbon.

"The conditions faced by organisms in Lake Whillans are quite parallel to what we think it would be like on those icy moons," Christner said.

"What we found tells us a lot about extreme life on Earth," and how similar life beyond Earth might survive.

Making a Living in Ice

A 50-member U.S. team broke through to the 20-square-mile (50-square-kilometer) subglacial lake on January 28, and had two days of 24-hour sunlight to bring up samples before the borehole began to close. A day of reaming the hole was followed by two more days of sample collection.

The scientists are now returning with a four-day haul of lake water, lake bottom sediments, and hundreds of dishes of living organisms that are being cultured for intensive study in the United States.

An early task will be to make sure the newfound microbes were not introduced while drilling through the ice into the lake, which involved a hot-water drilling technique designed to greatly reduce or eliminate any contamination that might come from other kerosene-based drilling technology, Christner said.

Christner said that a commonly used dye was added to the water to illuminate the DNA of the microscopic organisms, and a substantial green glow told scientists that microbes were indeed present. Many of the organisms are likely chemolithotrophs, which rely on inorganic compounds of iron, sulfur, and other elements for nourishment.

Montana State's John Priscu, chief biologist of the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) program, said lab work at the drill site determined that microbial cells were present—and that they were alive. (Take an Antarctic quiz.)

"I believe it is safe to say that subglacial lake beneath the Whillans Ice Stream supports a microbial assemblage that is growing within this dark and cold habitat" of 31 degrees Fahrenheit (-0.5 Celsius), he wrote in an email.

DNA sequencing in the U.S. "will tell us who they are and, together with other experiments, tell us how they make a living."

Hidden Lakes

The U.S. team is one of three digging into what is now known to be a vast system of lakes and streams deep below the surface of Antarctica. (See "Chain of Cascading Lakes Discovered Under Antarctica.")

A British team attempting to drill into much deeper Lake Ellsworth had to return home in December because of equipment failure, but a Russian team is also at work now retrieving a core of water from Lake Vostok.

With much fanfare, the Lake Vostok core was pulled up last year from more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) below the frigid surface. Vostok is much deeper and larger than any other Antarctic lake, and both it and Ellsworth lie under much colder ice and are believed to have less deep subsurface water flowing in and out than does Whillans.

The existence of subglacial lakes and streams in Antarctica is a relatively new discovery, and the size of this wet world under the ice has only been grasped in recent years. (See Antarctic pictures by National Geographic readers.)

Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a principal investigator of the Whillans team, first described Lake Whillans in 2007.

Using satellite data, she and her colleagues discovered a periodic rising and falling of the ice surface above the Whillans Ice Stream between 2003 and 2006, and concluded that a lake was likely underneath.

The dynamics of Antarctic ice has taken on a much greater significance in the era of global warming, since some 90 percent of Earth's fresh water sits on the continent.

Although the lakes themselves are not affected by warming, how they interact with the region's ice is important to predicting the future behavior of the ice sheets.

For instance, understanding whether the ice is moving more quickly toward the surrounding ocean is a key goal of the WISSARD project, which is part of a larger U.S. National Science Foundation project to understand the ice movements, glaciers, and biology of the ice sheet of West Antarctica.

More Work to Be Done

For Christner, a specialist in Antarctic biology at Louisiana State University, the work has only just begun. (Also see "Pictures: 'Extreme' Antarctic Science Revealed.")

Two labs were brought to the Whillans site by a caravan of trucks from McMurdo: One to perform a quick analysis of the lake water, and the other to examine sediment.

Christner's team is charged with culturing samples in dishes so they can be studied more extensively later. He said some of the microbe species, including bacteria and archaea, may be unique, but many may well be found elsewhere—at great ocean depths and deep underground.

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Sierra's Family Selling Photos to Cover Funeral, Kids

The family of Sarai Sierra, an amateur New York photographer slain while on a trip to Turkey, put her photos up for sale today and quickly sold enough photographs to pay forher funeral, the woman's brother said today.

The photos remain on sale and the profits will now be going to her two young sons, the family said.

Sierra, 33, was found bludgeoned to death near a highway in Istanbul on Saturday. Her iPhone and iPad, the tools she used to share her photos with her thousands of Instagram followers were reportedly missing.

The Staten Island mother of two traveled to Turkey alone on Jan. 7 after a friend had to cancel. It was Sierra's first overseas trip, and she kept in contact with her family the entire time, they said, sharing stories of her journey and posting photos online.

"Sarai's passion for photography and love for capturing the beauty we see in culture, architecture and scenery was her reason for traveling to Istanbul," her brother, David Jimenez, wrote on a website set up to sell his sister's photography.

Among the photos for sale are Istanbul sunsets, and shots of Sierra's beloved New York City.

Courtesy Sarai Sierra's family

New Clues in Death of Missing American Mother Watch Video

Sarai Sierra's Body Found: Missing New York Mom Found in Turkey Watch Video

Body Found in Search for Missing Mother in Turkey Watch Video

By this afternoon, Jimenez put out another message saying, "Hey Instacanvas, Thank you for all the support in purchasing Sarai's pictures. Quick update, all expenses for Sarai's funeral have been paid for! From here on out any picture of hers that you purchase will NOT be going towards her funeral. All funds will be going to her children. Thank you for your support. David"

Sierra had been scheduled to arrive home at Newark Liberty International Airport on Jan. 22. When her husband, Steven Sierra, called the airline, he was told his wife never boarded the flight from Istanbul.

Steven Sierra and Jimenez traveled to Istanbul to aid in the search.

An intense two week search for for Sarai Sierra ended when her battered body was found.

An autopsy was completed Sunday, but results aren't expected for three months. Turkish officials however said Sierra was killed by at least one fatal blow to her head.

A casket holding the Staten Island mother was taken to a Istanbul church Monday where it remains as Sierra's family makes arrangements to bring her home.

Turkish police hope DNA samples from 21 people being questioned in the case will be key to finding the perpetrators, state media reported. A motive is not yet clear.

"They're still investigating so they might think it might be a robbery, but they're not sure," said Betsy Jimenez, Sierra's mother, said Monday.

The family also faces the heartbreaking task of telling Sierra's two sons, ages 11 and 9, that their mother is dead.

The boys have been under the impression that their father has gone to Turkey to bring their mother home - alive.

"It's going to be the hardest thing he's ever going to have to do in his life," said Rep. Michael Grimm, (R-NY) who added that the Staten Island family isn't sure when Steven Sierra will be able to bring his wife's body home.

ABC News' Josh Haskell contributed to this report.

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Ice-age art hints at birth of modern mind

Sumit Paul-Choudhury, editor

Figurines from the Don river valley (Images: Kirstin Jennings)

The world’s oldest portrait, the world’s first fully carved sculpture, the world's oldest ceramic figure, the world’s earliest puppet - there’s no shortage of superlatives in the new exhibition of art from the ice age at the British Museum in London

But focus too closely on the exhibits’ record-breaking ages alone, and you might miss the broader point: these beautiful objects are the earliest evidence we have of humans who seem to have had minds like ours.

Consider, for example, the "lion man" found in 1939 in south-west Germany’s Stadel cave (pictured above). As the name suggests, this statue, standing 30 centimetres tall, harmoniously combines human and leonine features: the head is unmistakeably a lion’s, while the body and lower limbs are more human.

This is clearly the product of artistic creativity rather than a naturalistic drawing from life - suggesting that whoever carved it some 40,000 years ago had the capacity to express their imagination, as well as to replicate what they saw around them.

The temptation to speculate about what symbolic meaning the lion man might have had is, of course, irresistible. It was clearly valuable, taking around 400 hours and enormous skill to carve from a single piece of mammoth ivory.

The exhibition also includes a second, much smaller, feline figure found in another cave nearby, pointing to the idea that such imaginative objects might have cultural significance, perhaps as ritual objects within a shamanic belief system, rather than being isolated art objects.

Given what we know of modern traditions, that would make sense - but there is no hard evidence that anything resembling those traditions existed in Europe during the ice age.

Almost every object on show invites similarly thought-provoking consideration. Thumb-sized figurines from settlements along Russia's Don river (top) seem to present a woman's perception of her own pregnant body in an age before mirrors: no face, bowed head, the shelf of the bosom, the protrusion of the hips and buttock muscles and the swell of the belly. Were they carved by the women themselves, perhaps as protective talismans for themselves or their unborn children? And if so, what are we to make of those that were apparently deliberately destroyed subsequently?

Only a few of the animal models found at the Czech site of Dolní Věstonice are intact. The rest had shattered into thousands of clay fragments when they were heated while still wet. This must also have been deliberate: was the dramatic shattering part of a rite?

A tiny relief of a human figure with upraised arms invites interpretation as a celebrant or worshipper. Was he or she participating in a ceremony to promote social cohesion during tough times - perhaps to the accompaniment of music played on instruments such as the flute displayed nearby, which is precisely carved from a vulture's wing-bone?

Such interpretations deserve a healthy dose of caution, of course. The note accompanying an elegantly carved water bird (perhaps a cormorant) found near the smaller lion man drily reads: "This sculpture may be a spiritual symbol connecting the upper, middle and lower worlds of the cosmos reached by a bird that flies in the sky, moves on land and dives through water. Alternatively, it may be an image of a small meal and a bag of feathers."

In the total absence of documentary evidence, there is no way of telling which is correct: archaeological material might help clarify the utilitarian perspective, but it is far less helpful when it comes to discovering any symbolic value.

In any case, there is very little archaeological evidence on display at the British Museum. Curator Jill Cook says she was keen to avoid exhausting visitors with copious background material about the evolutionary and environmental contexts in which these objects were made.

Humans were capable of complex behaviour long before they reached Europe - as demonstrated by discoveries such as the 100,000-year old "artist's workshop" in South Africa's Blombos cave - but Cook thinks the explosion of art among Europeans 40,000 years ago may reflect changing social needs during the ice age.

When Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe some 45,000 years ago, "the living was initially probably reasonably easy", explains Cook. They would have found temperatures only about 5 °C lower than they are now, she says, and grassy prairies would have been well stocked with bison. As the human population grew, they would have had to find new ways of building, socialising and organising themselves.

“And as it turns desperately cold, around 40,000 years ago, suddenly we have all this art," she says.

That may have reflected the need to communicate and develop ideas - a need pressing enough for people to spend hundreds of hours creating objects that generally seem to have had little quotidian function.

"This is all about planning and preconceiving and organising and collaborating and compromising," suggests Cook, "and that is something art and music helps us do."

The dazzling array of objects on display, spanning tens of thousands of years, anticipate practically every modern artistic tradition. The first portrait, dating back 26,000 years, includes closely modelled details of its female subject's unusual physiognomy, perhaps the result of an injury or illness.

But nearby is an extraordinary figure of similar age whose facial features are utterly abstract, resembling a visor with a double slit in it.

Another (above) has a body whose angular patterns anticipate Cubism by some 23,000 years: Picasso kept two copies of it in his studio. Elsewhere, there are doll-like models of women with stylised faces, and female forms streamlined into little more than slender, strategically curved lines.

Representations of animals, too, come in all forms, from incredibly realistic illustrations scratched onto stone or ivory, to elegantly minimal sculptures; there are even carvings designed to create the illusion of movement when viewed from different angles or rotated (above) - a form of prehistoric animation.

The masterpieces in the latter part of the show include - and sometimes combine - both precisely observed, superbly rendered naturalism, and more abstract work that is still beautiful, but much harder to interpret.

Carved mammoth tusks

"The brain likes to tease us," says Cook. "We don't just represent things with great realism and naturalism, we like to break things down into patterns. That sparks your imagination, and makes you curious and questioning.

“What’s so spectacular about the modern brain, and the mind that it powers, is that it doesn't just make everything simple, it pushes us to new ideas and new thoughts."

After tens of thousands of years, the objects displayed in this extraordinary exhibition still have the power to do just that.

Ice Age Art: Arrival of the modern mind runs at the British Museum from 7 February 2013

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In mice, gene therapy boosts hope for the deaf

PARIS: Scientists using gene therapy have partially restored hearing and balance in profoundly deaf mice, according to a study published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

The research, still in its early stages and restricted to lab animals, may open up new avenues for tackling Usher syndrome, an inherited form of human deafness that usually goes hand in hand with blindness.

Researchers led by Michelle Hastings at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, Illinois, aimed at a gene called USH1C which has been implicated in the "Type 1" form of Usher syndrome.

USH1C controls a protein called harmonin, which plays a vital role in hair cells -- the cells in the cochlea of the inner ear that respond to sound waves and send an electrical signal to the brain.

The team devised a tiny strand of genetic material called an antisense oligonucleotide to "switch off" a faulty version of the gene that produces truncated forms of the protein.

The therapy was injected in newborn mice that had been genetically engineered to have the mutation.

A single injection partially restored their hearing at very low frequencies, and also reduced head tossing, a behaviour caused by impaired balance.

"These effects were sustained for several months, providing evidence that congenital deafness can be effectively overcome by treatment early in development to correct gene expression," the study says.

After the experiment, the mice were dissected, and their cochleas were found to have grown some hair cells.

The success of antisense oligonucleotides adds a further weapon in the quest to overcome deafness.

Last month, doctors at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School reported on a gene drug that transformed cells in the cochlea into hair cells.

In 2012, investigators at the University of California, San Francisco targeted a fix for a faulty version of a gene called VGLUT3. The gene controls a protein that is vital for hair cells to send the signals they pick up.

- AFP/jc

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Canadian penny bites the dust. Is the nickel next?

An obsolete coin for your thoughts: Google.ca paid tribute to the Canadian penny, which was first struck in 1858.

(Credit:
Google)

We Canadians love innovating our money. We're printing plastic banknotes and chucking out useless coins.

Last March I said I wouldn't mourn the passing of the Canadian penny.

And yet today, as the Royal Canadian Mint officially stopped distributing the cent to banks, I have mixed feelings. I saw the Google.ca animated doodle honoring the coin and felt a tad nostalgic.

So I fished out a few pennies from my pockets and considered the brazen image of Queen Elizabeth and the maple leaf.

There's something a little Dickensian in these worn coppers. The oldest on my desk is from 1977. The surface is dull and the queen looks a lot younger.

That coin passed through many hands only to wind up in mine. It's got a real-world history that makes it special.

Electronic money, and e-books for that matter, don't have that historicity, that unique physical existence through time.

While I'm glad to see the penny go, I also feel like I'm losing a tiny link to my fellow human beings, a connection I only really thought of now. Not to mention all those folksy idioms like "the penny drops."

For those who get dewy-eyed over its demise, the mint is offering 20,000 commemorative 50-cent rolls of the last million pennies manufactured.

Meanwhile, 99-cent sales could go out of fashion, since prices for cash sales are being rounded to the nearest nickel. Prices that end in 1 or 2 are rounded down to zero, those ending in 3, 4, 6, or 7 are rounded to 5, and those ending in 8 or 9 are rounded up to 10.

The mint was spending 1.6 cents on every penny it made until production ended last May; axing the coin is expected to save some $11 million. Canada follows New Zealand and Australia in stopping production of the penny.

While the billions of Canadian pennies still in circulation will be legal tender indefinitely, some are calling for the nickel to go too, though there has been some pushback with that idea.

"It shouldn't be as tough as a slog now because the case has been made that life as we know it isn't going to end if we eliminate the lowly penny," NDP member of Parliament Pat Martin was quoted as saying in the National Post.

Life hasn't ended, but I feel for all those penny pinchers out there.

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Space Pictures This Week: A Space Monkey, Printing a Moon Base

Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced January 31 that it is looking into building a moon base (pictured in an artist's conception) using a technique called 3-D printing.

It probably won't be as easy as whipping out a printer, hooking it to a computer, and pressing "print," but using lunar soils as the basis for actual building blocks could be a possibility.

"Terrestrial 3-D printing technology has produced entire structures," said Laurent Pambaguian, head of the project for ESA, in a statement.

On Earth, 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, produces a three-dimensional object from a digital file. The computer takes cross-sectional slices of the structure to be printed and sends it to the 3-D printer. The printer bonds liquid or powder materials in the shape of each slice, gradually building up the structure. (Watch how future astronauts could print tools in space.)

The ESA and its industrial partners have already manufactured a 1.7 ton (1.5 tonne) honeycombed building block to demonstrate what future construction materials would look like.

—Jane J. Lee

Published February 4, 2013

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Boy Safe, Kidnapper Dead as Ala. Standoff Ends

A week-long Alabama standoff in which a retired trucker held a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker has ended with the kidnapper dead and the child safe, according to law enforcement.

"FBI agents safely recovered the child who's been held hostage for nearly a week," FBI Special Agent Steve Richardson said at a news conference.

The agent said negotiations with the suspect, Richard Lee Dykes, "deteriorated" in the past 24 hours.

"Mr. Dykes was observed holding a gun," Richardson said. "At this point, the FBI agents, fearing the child was in imminent danger, entered the bunker and rescued the child."

The boy, identified only as Ethan, "appears physically unharmed" and is being treated at a hospital, authorities said.

Dykes, 65, is dead, but officials have not yet provided details on how he died.

Joe Songer/AL.com/AP Photo

Alabama Hostage Crisis: Boy Held Captive for 7 Days Watch Video

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Police Officials Thank Hostage Taker for Taking Care of Child Watch Video

"Right now, FBI special agent bomb technicians are in the process of clearing the property for improvised explosive devices," the FBI said in a written statement. "When it is safe to do so, our evidence response teams, paired with state and local crime scene technicians, will process the scene."

PHOTOS: Worst Hostage Situations

Dykes allegedly shot and killed a school bus driver last week and threatened to kill all the children on the bus before taking the boy, one of the students on the bus said.

"He said he was going to kill us, going to kill us all," Tarrica Singletary, 14, told ABC News.

Dykes had been holed up in his underground bunker near Midland City, Ala., with the abducted boy for a week as police tried to negotiate with him through a PVC pipe. Police had used the talks to send the child comfort items, including a red Hot Wheels car, coloring books, cheese crackers, potato chips and medicine.

Dykes was a decorated Vietnam vet who grew up in the area. He lived in Florida until two years ago, the AP reported, and has an adult daughter, but the two lost touch years ago, neighbor Michael Creel said. When he returned to Alabama, neighbors say he once beat a dog with a lead pipe and had threatened to shoot children who set foot on his property.

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Bug protects itself by turning its environment to gold

Mythical King Midas was ultimately doomed because everything he touched turned to gold. Now, the reverse has been found in bacteria that owe their survival to a natural Midas touch.

Delftia acidovorans lives in sticky biofilms that form on top of gold deposits, but exposure to dissolved gold ions can kill it. That's because although metallic gold is unreactive, the ions are toxic.

To protect itself, the bacterium has evolved a chemical that detoxifies gold ions by turning them into harmless gold nanoparticles. These accumulate safely outside the bacterial cells.

"This could have potential for gold extraction," says Nathan Magarvey of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who led the team that uncovered the bugs' protective trick. "You could use the bug, or the molecules they secrete."

He says the discovery could be used to dissolve gold out of water carrying it, or to design sensors that would identify gold-rich streams and rivers.

The protective chemical is a protein dubbed delftibactin A. The bugs secrete it into the surroundings when they sense gold ions, and it chemically changes the ions into particles of gold 25 to 50 nanometres across. The particles accumulate wherever the bugs grow, creating patches of gold.

Deep purple gold

But don't go scanning streams for golden shimmers: the nanoparticle patches do not reflect light in the same way as bigger chunks of the metal – giving them a deep purple colour.

When Magarvey deliberately snipped out the gene that makes delftibactin A, the bacteria died or struggled to survive exposure to gold chloride. Adding the protein to the petri dish rescued them.

The bacterium Magarvey investigated is one of two species that thrive on gold, both identified a decade or so ago by Frank Reith of the University of Adelaide in Australia. In 2009 Reith discovered that the other species, Cupriavidus metallidurans, survives using the slightly riskier strategy of changing gold ions into gold inside its cells.

"If delftibactin is selective for gold, it might be useful for gold recovery or as a biosensor," says Reith. "But how much dissolved gold is out there is difficult to say."

Journal reference: Nature Chemical Biology, DOI: 10.1038/NCHEMBIO.1179

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Obama urges Boy Scouts to end gay ban

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama said in an interview Sunday that the Boy Scouts of America should end its controversial ban on gays and lesbians when its national executive board takes up the issue next week.

"My attitude is that gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does in every institution and walk of life," Obama told CBS News in a pre-Super Bowl interview.

"The Scouts are a great institution that are promoting young people and exposing them to opportunities and leadership that will serve people for the rest of their lives," he said. "And I think nobody should be barred from that."

On January 28, the century-old youth group with 2.6 million boys in its membership ranks said it was rethinking its longstanding ban, and the group's national board of directors is expected to meet Wednesday to discuss the issue.

Unlike the Girl Scouts of the USA, a separate organisation, the Boy Scouts maintained for years a ban on "open or avowed homosexuals" from participating either as members or adult leaders.

Its stance was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2000, but it has come under pressure in recent years to change tack in the face of growing public acceptance of homosexuality.

The CBS interview was broadcast ahead of the Super Bowl, the American football sporting extravaganza that transfixes the country each year.

Obama also told CBS that he hopes to generate more revenue for the US budget without raising taxes by closing tax loopholes.

"There is no doubt we need additional revenue coupled with smart spending reductions to bring down our deficits," Obama said.

- AFP/jc

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Super Bowl does Wi-Fi on a massive scale

There should be no shortage of Wi-Fi at the Super Bowl. And the NFL want to make sure it stays that way.

The Wi-Fi network at the Superdome in New Orleans has been structured and reinforced to handle a stunning 30,000 simultaneous connections during the big game, starting shortly, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens. Ars Technica reported that detail and lots more about the setup -- for instance, there 700 wireless access points inside the stadium, and 250 right outside for folks in the parking lots.

Clearly, the NFL understands that we're already deep in the
tablet and smartphone era when people expect easy, uninterrupted access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and more.

But not unregulated access. Fans entering the Superdome are having their bags inspected for wireless gear that could undermine the robust functioning of the Wi-Fi network. There will be no "rogue access points," Dave Stewart, director of IT and production for Superdome management firm SMG, told Ars Technica:

Every device that enters the building has to go through a frequency scan and be authorized to enter. At the perimeter the devices are identified and tagged. If they present a potential for interference, they are remediated at that moment. Either the channel is changed or it is denied access. It's all stopped at the perimeter for this event.

One of the biggest worries is about devices such as wireless cameras tuned to the 2.4GHz frequency range.

The new Wi-Fi network was installed just this season, and though there were some trial runs during regular-seasons games, the Super Bowl marks the first time the network has been publicly advertised as available to all fans, according to Ars Technica. Verizon Wireless built the network, using Cisco gear.

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