* Astronomy

Unusual microbial ropes grow slowly in cave lake
Deep inside the Frasassi cave system in Italy and more than 1,600 feet below the Earth's surface, divers found filamentous ropes of microbes growing in the cold water, according to a team of Penn State researchers.

"Sulphur caves are a microbiology paradise. Many different types of organisms live in the caves and use the sulphur. We are trying to map which organisms live where in the caves and how they correspond to the geochemical environment" - Jennifer L. Macalady, assistant professor of geosciences.

In this process, Macalady and her team discovered a previously unknown form of biofilm growing in the oxygen-deficient portion of the lake.

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New life forms in the hot springs of Yellowstone
Yellowstone's hot springs show vivid yellows, oranges, reds, ochres, greens and blue-greens. Many of these colours are pigments produced by the different species of bacteria that exist on and within the roughly inch-thick microbial mats that form in and near the springs runoff channels. Octopus Spring earned its name from its complex shape. It's an alkaline spring, with a pH of 8.5 (the pH scale ranges from 1 to 14, with 7 being neutral: neither acidic nor alkaline). Octopus Spring also has a high content of dissolved silica and a relatively low sulphide content. Its geothermally heated source releases 95-degree C water (203 degrees F) very near boiling at the high altitude of Yellowstone, in the Rocky Mountains.

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The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometres beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit).
D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulphate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. Living alone, D. audaxviator must build its organic molecules by itself out of water, inorganic carbon, and nitrogen from ammonia in the surrounding rocks and fluid. During its long journey to the extreme depths, evolution has equipped the versatile spelunker with genes many of them shared with archaea, members of a separate domain of life unrelated to bacteria that allow it to cope with a range of different conditions, including the ability to fix nitrogen directly from elemental nitrogen in the environment.

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In the warm, bubbling pools of Mono Lake in California, scientists have isolated a bacterium that fuels itself on arsenic.
Combining light and arsenic, these bacteria make their food and multiply using a chemical that is toxic to most other life forms.
The researchers think using arsenic as an energy source was a process used by ancient bacteria.

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