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AUFORA News Update

AUFORA News Update
Friday, August 23rd, 1996

In this Edition:

SCIENTISTS FIND THIRD BRANCH OF TERRAN LIFE from CNN

WASHINGTON (Reuter) -- Just weeks after NASA announced possible evidence of ancient life on Mars, they are now hailing genetic proof of a third major branch of life on Earth -- tiny one-celled organisms called "archaea."

Archaea, from the Greek word for ancient, were discovered in 1977 and have since "posed an intriguing and incompletely resolved puzzle" about life forms and evolution, researchers write in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Scientists have identified and sequenced the genome in one type of archaea and were astonished to find that two-thirds of the genes were different from anything biologists had seen before.

"This brings to closure the question of whether archaea are separate and distinct life forms," said Craig Venter, president of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, which did the research along with scientists at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore.

Although archaea are distinct, they also have some traits in common with the other two branches or "domains" of life -- bacteria and the more complex "eukaryotes," which include plants, animals and humans. Like bacteria, they lack a nuclear membrane and have one circular chromosome. Yet many of their cellular functions resemble those of eukaryotes, and the report suggests archaea and eukaryotes "share a common evolutionary trajectory."

Moreover, since archaea live in areas previously thought to be uninhabitable by any living thing, scientists say the discovery is even more intriguing given the recent findings about possible life on Mars or other planets.

"Our understanding of this organism significantly increases the likelihood that life exists on other planets. We know from this genomic (or DNA) sequence that life has other parameters and may exist in ways that will revolutionize our thinking," Venter said. At a news conference Thursday, Venter showed a video of how one sample of archaea was collected from a thermal vent 8,060 feet (2,457 meters) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The organism existed in the vent's walls between the cold of the surrounding ocean and the extreme heat -- about 600 degrees Fahrenheit (316 Celsius) -- of the steam in the vent.

"These organisms, they do sound like things out of science fiction because we can't relate to them in terms of our own life," Venter said. "If we can begin to understand these and understand the extremes of life here and how we might have evolved from these or other organisms, it gives us a certainly much better chance of finding life elsewhere in the universe."

On August 7, NASA released its analysis of tests that scientists said proved the existence of life on Mars billions of years ago. The Science report said researchers identified and sequenced all the genes in an archaeon called Methanococcus jannaschii, an organism that lives in hot, deep water and produces methane. It is only the fourth organism for which the complete genome has been identified.

The researchers identified 1,738 protein-coding genes in M. jannaschii and have worked out the specific tasks of close to 40 percent of them. The work, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, will spur basic scientific research into the fundamental operations and functions of the cell. It also has huge potential commercial interest for biotechnology companies working on health, renewable energy and environmental cleanup projects.

WHITE DWARF SUGGEST OUR GALAXY FORMED 14-17 BILLION YEARS AGO from Nando Times

LONDON (Aug 22, 1996 00:00 a.m. EDT) - New guesses published on Wednesday about the age of the universe using white dwarf stars add to growing evidence that it is older rather than younger.

Astronomers said their findings indicated the Milky Way galaxy started forming between 14 and 17 billion years ago and gradually cooled and coalesced into stars 10 billion years ago.

Reporting in the science journal Nature, Terry Oswalt of the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne and colleagues at the NASA Goddard Space Centre in Maryland said they looked at white dwarfs nearby -- in the Earth's own Milky Way galaxy.

They measured light from the dying white dwarf stars to estimate when they had been created -- and from there when the galaxy first formed and the universe before that.

"They cool slowly enough that even the oldest white dwarfs are still observable...and they therefore provide a record of the age and star-formation history of the local disk of the Milky Way -- and hence a useful constraint on the age of the Galaxy itself," they wrote.

The Milky Way probably started forming about a billion years after the Big Bang that scientists say started the universe.

Therefore, their measurements would indicate the universe could not possibly be any younger than 11.5 billion years -- which is older than some recent theories that say it is only eight to nine billion years old.

Scientists do not yet agree on how old the universe actually is, but think it is anywhere between eight and 17 billion years old.

Earlier this month Alvio Renzini of the European Southern Observatory said they estimated the age of white dwarfs using light emissions to measure how much iron they had remaining in their cores. They said their findings put the stars at a minimum of 13 billion years old.

AUFORA News Update Issue 08.23.96

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