Alleged Cop-Killer Has Calif. Region on Edge

The truck owned and driven by suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner during his alleged rampage through the Los Angeles area was found deserted and in flames on the side of Bear Mountain, Calif., this afternoon.

Heavily armed SWAT team members descended onto Bear Mountain from a helicopter manned with snipers today to investigate the fire. The San Bernadino Sheriff's Department confirmed the car was Dorner's.

Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is believed to have killed one police officer and injured two others early this morning in Riverside, Calif. He is also accused of killing two civilians on Sunday after releasing a scathing "manifesto" alleging grievances committed by the police department while he worked for it and warning of coming violence toward cops.

Heavily armed officers spent much of Thursday searching for signs of Dorner, investigating multiple false leads into his whereabouts and broadcasting his license plate and vehicle description across the California Highway System.

Around 3:45 p.m. ET, police responded to Bear Mountain, where two fires were reported, and set up a staging area in the parking lot of a ski resort. They did not immediately investigate the fires, but sent a small team of heavily armed officers up in the helicopter to descend down the mountain toward the fire.

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The officers, carrying machine guns and searching the mountain for any sign of Dorner, eventually made it to the vehicle and identified it as belonging to Dorner. They have not yet found Dorner.

Late this afternoon, CNN announced that Dorner had sent a package containing his manifesto and a DVD to its offices.

Police officers across Southern California were on the defensive today, scaling back their public exposure, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outdoors.

Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be targets of Dorner's alleged rampage.

"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today, and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses," said Chief Sergio Diaz of the police department in Riverside, Calif., where the officers were shot. "We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today."

Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles Police Department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."

Early Thursday morning, before they believe he shot at any police officers, Dorner allegedly went to a yacht club near San Diego, where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.

He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was then that he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.

"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," said Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department.

Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review

A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the data

Universal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis

A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic resistance

Choking China: The struggle to clear Beijing's air

As pollution levels return to normal in China's capital after a record-breaking month of smog, what can be done to banish the smog?

Genes mix across borders more easily than folk tales

Analysing variations in folk tales using genetic techniques shows that people swap genes more readily than stories, giving clues to how cultures evolve

Sleep and dreaming: Slumber at the flick of a switch

Wouldn't it be wonderful to pack a good night's sleep into fewer hours? Technology has the answer - and it could treat depression and even extend our lives too

Closest Earth-like planet may be 13 light years away

A habitable exoplanet should be near enough for future telescopes to probe its atmosphere for signs of life

Lifelogging captures a real picture of your health

How can lifelogging - wearing a camera round your neck to record your every move - reveal what's healthy and unhealthy in the way we live?

Musical brains smash audio algorithm limits

The mystery of how our brains perceive sound has deepened, now that musicians have broken a limit on sound perception imposed by the Fourier transform

Magnitude 8 earthquake strikes Solomon Islands

A major earthquake has caused a small tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least five people

Nuclear knock-backs on UK's new reactors and old waste

Plans to build new reactors in the UK are stalling as yet another company pulls out, and there is still nowhere to store nuclear waste permanently

Amateur astronomer helps Hubble snap galactic monster

An amateur astronomer combined his pictures with images from the Hubble archive to reveal the true nature of galactic oddball M106

Nightmare images show how lack of sleep kills

Fatigue has been blamed for some of worst human-made disasters of recent decades. Find out more in our image gallery

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Football: Bengtson lifts Honduras over US

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras: Jerry Bengtson scored in the 79th minute to give Honduras a 2-1 victory over the United States on Wednesday in the North American qualifying final-round opener for the 2014 Brazil World Cup.

The New England Revolution striker knocked in the decider, aided by a blunder from a US defensive unit with relatively few World Cup qualifying caps while American veteran Carlos Bocanegra was watching from the bench.

Juan Carlos Garcia netted a spectacular bicycle kick for Honduras to equalise in the 39th minute after the visitors had seized the lead on a goal by Tottenham's Clint Dempsey in the 36th.

The critical stretch began when Oscar Garcia pushed the ball past US defender Geoff Cameron, who plays for Stoke City in England.

US goalkeeper Tim Howard, who plays for English side Everton, came after the ball but Garcia flicked the ball past him into the empty penalty area where an onrushing Bengtson kicked it home before a sliding Omar Gonzalez could stop him.

Juan Carlos Garcia, a 24-year-old left back, made a spectacular bicycle-kick goal in the 39th minute that pulled Honduras level 1-1 at half-time.

Maynor Figueroa took a centering pass on the chest and deflected the ball into the crowded heart of the penalty area, where Garcia made an incredible somersault and followed with a hammering kick past Howard.

Dempsey put the Americans ahead 1-0 by taking a perfect lob centering pass from Jermaine Jones in full stride while leaping into the air on a run midway through the penalty area.

Without an instant's pause, Dempsey blasted the ball past Honduran goalkeeper Noel Valladares to open the scoring.

Other regional qualifiers on Wednesday find Jamaica at Mexico and Costa Rica at Panama.

The three top teams after Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) round-robin matches will qualify for Brazil. The fourth-place team will face a team from Oceania for another berth.

- AFP/de

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People crave Windows 8 tablets at work more than iPads

Are you drooling?

(Credit:
CNET)

Humans have an insatiable desire for novelty.

Ask them what they want today and it's whatever is new today.

This is something that might be music to Microsoft's lobes and loins. For a thorough piece of research by Forrester suggests that those who work in information would prefer it if they could have a new, exciting
Windows 8 tablet for work, rather than an
iPad.

With timing that some might see as wafting between propitious and suspicious, this research offers that 32 percent of those surveyed declared their panting desire for a sexy new Windows 8 work machine.

As ReadWrite reports, a mere 26 percent said please could they have an iPad. (Android lagged at 12 percent.)

The lovely thing about this research is that it wasn't conducted among 300 people who happened to be hanging around on Twitter, seeking a free thrill.

No, this sample size was 9,766 "information workers."

The less lovely thing is that these information workers didn't seem to offer any information as to their reasoning.

In my own dreamy mind, I hope that their reasoning was predominantly emotional, as this would signify that Microsoft is finally learning to tap right-brain juices, rather than the pedantic, plodding rational side.

With the advent of the Surface Pro, one imagines that, if this research is accurate, there might be a clamoring for the Surface range.

This would be a clamoring that has yet to take place, as some say only 900,000 Surface tablets shipped in the last quarter of 2012.

This research reflected these small beginnings, as only 2 percent of respondents said they owned a Windows 8
tablet.

In this same study, Forrester was less optimistic about Microsoft's chances in phones, as 33 percent of these same workers wanted their next phone to be an iPhone, while only 10 percent were fascinated by a Windows Phone.

More Technically Incorrect

This is a pity, as the Nokia Lumia 920 is -- to my human eyes -- a more than interesting alternative to the iPhone. Indeed, I have watched women flock around my engineer friend George when he subtly materializes his Lumia on a night out.

As more workers bring their own devices to work, it will be instructive as to what choices they make. Will they err toward their own sense of style and pleasure? Or will some sense of righteous businessness prevail?

Or perhaps that gap is closing.

Still, there is plenty of trepidation about Windows 8's ability to maintain Microsoft's hold on work life.

Here's a quote from an organization that professed a little knowledge: "We do not expect enterprises to adopt Windows 8 as their primary IT standard." The headline was: "By The Numbers: Is Windows 8 Dead On Arrival In The Enterprise?"

That was Forrester, too.

As my erudite friend Taylor always tells me: "We live in very interesting times. Uncertain, but interesting."

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Humans Swap DNA More Readily Than They Swap Stories

Jane J. Lee

Once upon a time, someone in 14th-century Europe told a tale of two girls—a kind one who was rewarded for her manners and willingness to work hard, and an unkind girl who was punished for her greed and selfishness.

This version was part of a long line of variations that eventually spread throughout Europe, finding their way into the Brothers Grimm fairytales as Frau Holle, and even into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (Watch a video of the Frau Holle fairytale.)

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it's much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

The study, published February 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that about 9 percent of the variation in the tale of the two girls occurred between ethnolinguistic groups. Previous studies looking at the genetic diversity across groups in Europe found levels of variation less than one percent.

For example, there's a part of the story in which the girls meet a witch who asks them to perform some chores. In different renditions of the tale, the meeting took place by a river, at the bottom of a well, or in a cave. Other versions had the girls meeting with three old men or the Virgin Mary, said Atkinson.

Conformity

Researchers have viewed human culture through the lens of genetics for decades, said Atkinson. "It's a fair comparison in the sense that it's just variation across human groups."

But unlike genes, which move into a population relatively easily and can propagate randomly, it's harder for new ideas to take hold in a group, he said. Even if a tale can bridge the "ethnolinguistic boundary," there are still forces that might work against a new cultural variation that wouldn't necessarily affect genes.

"Humans don't copy the ideas they hear randomly," Atkinson said. "We don't just choose ... the first story we hear and pass it on.

"We show what's called a conformist bias—we'll tend to aggregate across what we think everyone else in the population is doing," he explained. If someone comes along and tells a story a little differently, most likely, people will ignore those differences and tell the story like everyone else is telling it.

"That makes it more difficult for new ideas to come in," Atkinson said.

Cultural Boundaries

Atkinson and his colleagues found that if two versions of the folktale were found only six miles (ten kilometers) away from each other but came from different ethnolinguistic groups, such as the French and the Germans, then those versions were as different from each other as two versions taken from within the same group—say just the Germans—located 62 miles (100 kilometers) away from each other.

"To me, the take-home message is that cultural groups strongly constrain the flow of information, and this enables them to develop highly local cultural traditions and norms," said Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in the U.K., who wasn't involved in the new study.

Pagel, who studies the evolution of human behavior, said by email that he views cultural groups almost like biological species. But these groups, which he calls "cultural survival vehicles," are more powerful in some ways than our genes.

That's because when immigrants from a particular cultural group move into a new one, they bring genetic diversity that, if the immigrants have children, get mixed around, changing the new population's gene pool. But the new population's culture doesn't necessarily change.

Atkinson plans to keep using the tools of the population-genetics trade to see if the patterns he found in the variations of the kind and unkind girls hold true for other folktale variants in Europe and around the world.

Humans do a lot of interesting things, Atkinson said. "[And] the most interesting things aren't coded in our DNA."

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Galaxy May Be Full of 'Second Earths'

You may look out on a starry night and get a lonely feeling, but astronomers now say our Milky Way galaxy may be thick with planets much like Earth -- perhaps 4.5 billion of them, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers looked at data from NASA's Kepler space telescope in orbit, and conclude that 6 percent of the red dwarf stars in the Milky Way probably have Earth-like, habitable planets. That's a lot by space standards, and since red dwarfs are very common -- they make up three out of four stars in our part of the galaxy -- we may have a lot more neighbors than we thought.

The nearest of them, astronomers said today, could be 13 light-years away -- not exactly commuting distance, since a light-year is six trillion miles, but a lot closer than most yellow stars like Earth's sun.

Video: Are We Alone? Kepler's Mission

David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted," said Courtney Dressing, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, in announcing the findings today. The results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

David Charbonneau, a co-author, said, "We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy. That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought."

Red dwarfs are older, smaller and dimmer than our sun, but a planet orbiting close to one could be sufficiently warmed to have liquid water. Dressing and her colleagues cited three possible planets that were spotted by Kepler, which was launched in 2009. One is 90 percent as large as Earth, and orbits its red sun in just 20 of our days.

There is no saying what such a world would actually be like; the Kepler probe can only show whether distant stars have objects periodically passing in front of them. But based on that, scientists can do some math and estimate the mass and orbit of these possible planets. So far, Kepler has spotted more than 2,700 of them in the small patch of sky it has been watching.

There are estimated to be 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way -- which is probably a pretty average galaxy. So the new estimate implies a universe with tremendous numbers of Earth-like planets, far beyond our ability to count.

Pictures: Final Frontier: Images From the Distant Universe

Could they be friendly to life? There's no way to know yet, but space scientists say that if you have the right ingredients -- a planet the right size, temperatures that allow for liquid water, organic molecules and so forth -- and the chances may be good, even on a planet that is very different from ours.

"You don't need an Earth clone to have life," said Dressing.

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere

A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors

Baby boomers' health worse than their parents

Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same age

New 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime

A distributed computing project called GIMPS has found a record-breaking prime number, the first for four years

Cellular signals used to make national rainfall map

The slight weakening of microwave signals caused by reflections off raindrops can be exploited to keep tabs on precipitation

NASA spy telescopes won't be looking at Earth

A Mars orbiter and an exoplanet photographer are among proposals being presented today for how to use two second-hand spy satellites that NASA's been given

China gets the blame for media hacking spree

The big US newspapers and Twitter all revealed last week that they were hacked - and many were quick to blame China. But where's the proof?

Nobel-winning US energy secretary steps down

Steven Chu laid the groundwork for government-backed renewable energy projects - his successor must make a better case for them

Sleep and dreaming: Where do our minds go at night?

We are beginning to understand how our brains shape our dreams, and why they contain such an eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre

Beating heart of a quantum time machine exposed

This super-accurate timekeeper is an optical atomic clock and its tick is governed by a single ion of the element strontium

A life spent fighting fair about the roots of violence

Despite the fierce conflicts experienced living among anthropologists, science steals the show in Napoleon Chagnon's autobiography Noble Savages

Challenge unscientific thinking, whatever its source

Science may lean to the left, but that's no reason to give progressives who reject it a "free pass"

Need an organ? Just print some stem cells in 3D

Printing blobs of human embryonic stem cells could allow us to grow organs without scaffolds

Ice-age art hints at birth of modern mind

An exhibition of ice-age art at London's British Museum shows astonishing and enigmatic creativity

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Passion in US lower house immigration debate

WASHINGTON: US lawmakers debated plans on Tuesday to build a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants who remade their lives in America but found themselves at the heart of a fierce debate.

President Barack Obama and a group of Republican and Democratic senators have submitted plans for reform, but as the House of Representatives took up the issue, there were signs the bipartisan facade is coming under strain.

While from the Democratic side of the aisle, a rising Hispanic-American political star made an impassioned plea to fix a broken system, more senior Republicans warned against pushing too fast for change.

"Immigration is more than a political issue. It's who we are," said Julian Castro, the charismatic young mayor of San Antonio, Texas who had a star turn last year on the stage of the Democratic National Convention.

"Immigrants have made ours the greatest country in the world," he told a packed House Judiciary Committee hearing. "Doing nothing is not an option."

But Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the committee, warned against a "rush to judgment" -- despite concerns among his Republican colleagues that they have lost the support of a generation of Hispanic and Asian voters.

"I think we can all agree that our nation's immigration system is in desperate need of repair and it is not working as efficiently and fairly as it should be," he told the first of several hearings on the issue.

Goodlatte warned his panel "needs to take the time to learn from the past so our efforts to reform our immigration laws do not repeat the same mistakes."

The burst of activity on Capitol Hill marks the best chance in years to craft legislation to tighten border security, improve employment verification and bring some 11 million illegal immigrants out of limbo.

A 2007 effort spearheaded by then-president George W. Bush failed.

Obama and top Republicans are for once in agreement that political and demographic trends have suddenly shifted to offer the best chance for serious reform in a generation.

November's election saw Obama re-elected with 70 percent backing from Hispanic American voters -- many of whom have friends or relatives seeking papers.

It shook Republicans into realizing that their tough stance on immigration had driven Hispanics away from the party, and party luminaries like Senator Marco Rubio have come out strongly in favor of immigration reform.

But differences remain, particularly in the contentious issue of how to accommodate the millions who entered the country without permission, or who came in legally but overstayed their visas.

The issue bubbled over in the hearing room when about eight protesters stood up with fists raised, and chanted "undocumented and unafraid!" for about 30 seconds before walking out.

Castro said a pathway to citizenship, similar to the one proposed by the bipartisan group of senators last month, was crucial in order to bring 11 million undocumented immigrants "out of the shadows and into the full light of the American dream."

Republican Goodlatte pushed back, seeking to carve a possible compromise option short of full citizenship for those who entered illegally or stayed beyond their visa.

"Are there options that we should consider between the extremes of mass deportation and a pathway to citizenship for those not lawfully present in the United States?" Goodlatte asked.

Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer from California, conceded the system was dysfunctional, but that "partial legalization, as some are suggesting, is a dangerous path."

She argued that merely providing undocumented workers with legal status but no way to work towards full citizenship could create a "permanent underclass," while kicking the undocumented out en masse would trigger economic chaos.

With up to 90 percent of the estimated two million migrant farm workers in the country illegally, "you could do e-verify and find out they're not properly here and American agriculture would collapse."

Obama addressed the immigration issue Tuesday as well, hosting meetings with more than two dozen progressive leaders and business executives.

Steve Case, co-founder of America Online, said he was encouraged by the discussion at the White House.

"The president and his team listened to numerous proposals, outlined many of their own and expressed a desire to build a bipartisan consensus regarding comprehensive immigration reform," Case said.

-AFP/ac

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Apple's ownership of 'iPhone' name in Brazil in peril

Apple could soon lose its rights to use the iPhone name in Brazil as part of a decision expected from the local patent and trademark office next week.

Citing an unnamed source, both Reuters and Folha de S.Paulo today say The Brazilian Institute of Intellectual Property plans to award an exclusive iPhone name trademark to Brazil-based electronics company Gradiente.

Gradiente filed for the iPhone naming rights in the country years before Apple's device came to be. However the company didn't put out its own iPhone-branded product until last December when it began selling a line of touchscreen smartphones running Google's
Android.

In a release about the new products, Gradiente said it had secured the legal rights to the name through 2018.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the reports.

Apple famously wrestled the rights to the iPhone name in the U.S. from Cisco Systems in early 2007, just months before the product's release. Cisco sued Apple for trademark infringement immediately after the iPhone was unveiled at the annual Macworld conference in January that same year. In its complaint, Cisco said Apple had approached the company over the name a number of times, even using a shell company in an attempt to acquire the moniker. The two ended up settling in February 2007.

Internationally the story has been a bit more interesting, including a fight in China over the rights to the "iPad" trademark with a company called Proview. That dispute, which threatened sales of the popular
tablet in the country, was settled last July for $60 million. A similar result is expected in Brazil if the patent office sides with Gradiente, with a report earlier today quoting a company official saying he was "open to a dialogue" of such a deal.

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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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