Near our planet's poles are occasional lakes, buried in ice for eons. In some cases, a lot of ice. Over the last decade, researchers have been carefully piercing a few of these ancient vaults, wondering if some microbes could have migrated into the deep pocket of liquid water, or hung on down there from warmer times, in the pitch-black, freezing cold. They didn't expect this:
Researchers drilling through a half mile of ice in west Antarctica came upon a surprising discovery: a population of fish and other invertebrates living deep beneath the ice sheet in extreme cold and perpetual darkness. It's the farthest south that fish have ever been found, scientists said. The discovery was made earlier this month by researchers with Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling, or WISSARD. The National Science Foundation-funded team is investigating the "grounding zone" — the place where Antarctic ice, land and sea all converge — of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, roughly 530 miles
- We can't upload our minds and postpone death ... but we might be able to upload a worm's mind now.
- The Frilled Shark, it's bizarre.
- Low oil prices = good for environment. But keep in mind the flip side of that: unusually high prices might mean we'd be putting up rigs anywhere, in Yosemite or Yellowstone, if there was oil to be had. Anyone who opposed that kind of exploration and development, in the heat of the pricey moment, would probably face one hell of a tough political battle.
- This is cool:
For the first time, words have been read from a burnt, rolled-up scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The scrolls of Herculaneum, the only classical library still in existence, were blasted by volcanic gas hotter than 300C and are desperately fragile. Deep inside one scroll, physicists distinguished the ink from the paper using a 3D X-ray imaging technique sometimes.
- Last and sad to say, trees in California have been decimated by drought and development:
Researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the U.S. Geological Survey compared tree surveys conducted between 1929 and 1936 with surveys conducted between 2001 and 2010. They found that large tree density fell across California, with declines of as much as 50% in the Sierra Nevada highlands, the south and central Coast Ranges and Northern California. At the same time, the density of smaller trees increased dramatically.