Gerald
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Mars/blue berries/NASA pondering!
« Reply #43 on: February 16, 2005, 03:10:01 PM » Quote Modify Remove Split Topic
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http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/m ... 50216.html
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Exclusive: NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars
By Brian Berger
Space News Staff Writer
posted: 16 February 2005
02:09 pm ET
WASHINGTON -- A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.
The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.
What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.
Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto river—so-called because of its reddish tint—the product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water.
Stoker did not respond to messages left Tuesday on her voice mail at Ames.
Stoker told SPACE.com in 2003, weeks before leading the expedition to southwestern Spain, that by studying the very acidic Rio Tinto, she and other scientists hoped to characterize the potential for a “chemical bioreactor” in the subsurface – an underground microbial ecosystem of sorts that might well control the chemistry of the surface environment.
Making such a discovery at Rio Tinto, Stoker said in 2003, would mean uncovering a new, previously uncharacterized metabolic strategy for living in the subsurface. “For that reason, the search for life in the Rio Tinto is a good analog for searching for life on Mars,” she said.
Stoker told her private audience Sunday evening that by comparing discoveries made at Rio Tinto with data collected by ground-based telescopes and orbiting spacecraft, including the European Space Agency’s Mars Express, she and Lemke have made a very a strong case that life exists below Mars’ surface.
The two scientists, according to sources at the Sunday meeting, based their case in part on Mars’ fluctuating methane signatures that could be a sign of an active underground biosphere and nearby surface concentrations of the sulfate jarosite, a mineral salt found on Earth in hot springs and other acidic bodies of water like Rio Tinto that have been found to harbor life despite their inhospitable environments.
One of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, Opportunity, bolstered the case for water on Mars when it discovered jarosite and other mineral salts on a rocky outcropping in Merdiani Planum, the intrepid rover’s landing site chosen because scientists believe the area was once covered by salty sea.
Stoker and Lemke’s research could lead the search for Martian biology underground, where standing water would help account for the curious methane signatures the two have been analyzing.
“They are desperate to find out what could be producing the methane,” one attendee told Space News. “Their answer is drill, drill, drill.”
NASA has no firm plans for sending a drill-equipped lander to Mars, but the agency is planning to launch a powerful new rover in 2009 that could help shed additional light on Stoker and Lemke’s intriguing findings. Dubbed the Mars Science Laboratory, the nuclear-powered rover will range farther than any of its predecessors and will be carrying an advanced mass spectrometer to sniff out methane with greater sensitivity than any instrument flown to date.
In 1996 a team of NASA and Stanford University researchers created a stir when they published findings that meteorites recovered from the Allen Hills region of Antarctica contained evidence of possible past life on Mars. Those findings remain controversial, with many researchers unconvinced that those meteorites held even possible evidence that very primitive microbial life had once existed on Mars.
Gerald
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Mars/blue berries/NASA pondering!
« Reply #35 on: January 12, 2005, 05:28:57 PM » Quote Modify Remove Split Topic
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Something else, for NASA, to PONDER.
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For those here who may be looking for more information on electroculture and
what does/doesn't work, as well as why. Particuarly interesting is section 4,
which discusses use of "physically conditioned water."
Perhaps this article can also be construed as a mainstream-science answer to
those who gainsay the idea that "conditioned water" can have a different
impact on humans than unconditioned water.
Regards,
Karl
******************************************************************************
*From:
http://www.bio.ic.ac.uk/research/agold/goldsworthy.htm Plant Electrophysiology
1. The Evolution of Action Potentials
Plants do not have nerves but can generate "action potentials" that look like
nerve impulses but propagate through their ordinary cells. Sometimes they have
a role in long distance communication, e.g. the folding of Mimosa pudica
leaves when the plant is touched is controlled by action potentials
propagating in the phloem. But this is not always the case. Some higher plant
action potentials are confined to their cell of origin. Also microscopic
unicells have them. This led me to think that they evolved originally for some
other function, probably in a microscopic unicellular ancestor common to both
animals and plants. But what did they do there and how did they later get
their role in long distance communication?
I think their primary function was to switch off the cell's "membrane
potential" when the membrane had been injured. The membrane potential is a
voltage of several tens of millivolts generated by ion pumps across the cells
external membrane. It is used, amongst other things, to supply energy for
nutrient uptake. Its voltage is low, but because the membrane is so thin, the
voltage gradient across the membrane is enormous (about ten million volts per
metre!). The membrane therefore has to be an extremely good insulator. But if
it were to be punctured, it would be unable to repair itself since the rapid
flow of ions through the hole in this gradient would prevent it being sealed.
Action potentials may have originally evolved in unicells to shut off the
membrane potential for long enough for repair to occur. They are generated by
ion channels in the cell membrane briefly opening in response to the drop in
the voltage across the membrane that occurs when it is punctured. The response
begins at the site of the injury, but spreads like a wave that short-circuits
the whole of the cell's surface. This rapid spreading led to its being
hi-jacked in evolution as a rapid means of communication in both plants and
animals. Plants, such as Mimosa use their ordinary cells to transmit the
signal and generally have a simple response. But animals developed special
elongated cells to carry the signal. These were the first nerve cells, which
eventually gave rise to our whole complex nervous system and control all our
senses, movements and thoughts. [This hypothesis was first published in the
"Journal of Theoretical Biology" and later as a feature article in the "New
Scientist" under the title "The Cell Electric".]
2. DC Potentials and the Control of Cell Polarity
Animal and plant cells use steady DC electric currents to control their
physiological polarity and direction of growth. A combination of ion pumps and
channels generates a weak electric current flowing through the cell, with its
point of entry normally determining the growing region. Physiological polarity
is controlled partly by the electrophoretic distribution of differently
charged membrane proteins along the cell's electrical axis and partly by the
local ingress of calcium ions where the current enters, stimulating metabolism
in the growing region.
We used a very sensitive device called a vibrating probe to measure current
entering and leaving individual cells in plant tissue cultures. We wanted to
know how neighbouring cells in a tissue maintained the same electrical
polarity so that they could grow in the same direction. We found that
individual cells generated their own polar electric currents, but the
direction of these currents could be changed by a brief application of a weak
external current, after which the cell's new current was in the same direction
as the one we had applied. This implies that the cells of a tissue may keep
themselves aligned by sensing the currents generated by their neighbours and
orienting their own currents to match. We also found that this reorientation
of electrical polarity in an artificial current did not occur if calcium was
missing from the culture medium or if the cell's calcium channels were
blocked. This suggests that calcium entry via ion channels plays an essential
role in the cells ability to detect and respond to weak electric currents.
[See Mina and Goldsworthy, 1992].
3. Effects of Externally Applied Electric Fields on Growth.
There are many reports in the literature that plant growth is stimulated under
high voltage lines. Work on this as a possible means of increasing
agricultural yield began in the early 1900s and continued for several decades
under the name "electroculture". It was later abandoned because the results
were not always consistent and growth was often worse if the fields were
applied under dry conditions. I wanted to know if this effect was real and, if
so, why plants were so sensitive to electric fields
My research assistant (Alberto Lagoa) investigated this using plant tissue
cultures. He found quite large stimulations of growth and they often became
greener when weak electric currents were passed through them. Perhaps the
cells were detecting the current by the same calcium-dependent mechanism that
controls their polar growth and the calcium uptake was increasing their growth
rate by acting as a second messenger. If so, the same thing could have been
happening in the field experiments on electroculture, since similar currents
carried by air ions would flow from the overhead wires to the crop. This
ability to sense external currents may even have a selective advantage since
strong electrical fields, similar to those used in electroculture, occur
naturally under thunderclouds. These too should stimulate growth. It may even
explain why your garden looks particularly green and lush after a
thunderstorm. This may be an ecological advantage since the natural fields
enable the plant to predict rain and activate its growth mechanisms in time to
make the best use of it [See "Growing in Electric Fields", "New Scientist" Aug
23rd 1997].
4. Biological Effects of Physically Conditioned Water
Physically conditioned water is water that has been magnetically treated,
either by passing it rapidly through a strong permanent magnetic field or
exposing it to a much weaker pulsating one. Strictly speaking, it is not the
water that is affected, but colloidal particles suspended in it as impurities.
The electromagnetic treatment disturbs the shell of ions that normally
surrounds these particles and (amongst other things) makes them more
attractive to calcium ions
Conditioned water is used primarily to prevent and remove limescale in
plumbing because of its calcium sequestering properties, but there are many
reports that it also stimulates plant growth. Since the conditioning process
is very cheap, there is a huge potential for increasing crop yield in
hydroponics and even conventional agriculture at almost no cost, simply by
irrigating with conditioned water. Quite a lot of people have already tried
this, but the results have been inconsistent. Sometimes it worked, sometimes
it didn't, no one knew why, and most people gave up.
However, we may be on the verge of a breakthrough. We have discovered that one
of the factors affecting the response is the length of time for which the
water is conditioned. We grew wheat seedlings in tap water that had been
exposed to weak pulsating electromagnetic fields for varying lengths of time.
In our set-up, we found that there were indeed stimulations of growth, with
the best occurring with water that had been conditioned for about 30 seconds.
However, periods of conditioning in excess of a minute or more gave the
opposite result and inhibited growth. Could this be the cause of all the
inconsistent results? If so, we should be able to improve on things by
subjecting the irrigation water to just the right level of conditioning. But
what is the right level? It may be different for different water samples,
different water conditioners and different crops. We needed a quick method of
telling whether a given sample of conditioned water was likely to stimulate
growth.
We tried various techniques, but in the end we discovered an electrical method
that worked rather well. It is based on the principle that when plant roots
take up nutrients, various ions flow in and out and change the voltage between
the root and the surrounding medium. We discovered a simple way to measure
this voltage and found that giving the roots conditioned water made it
increase within a matter of minutes. Furthermore, the length of the
conditioning period giving maximum voltage increase also corresponded to that
giving maximum growth. This would not be surprising if growth correlates with
nutrient uptake. More research is needed to discover how general this effect
is, but we may have discovered a useful means to increase the yield of crops
irrigated with conditioned water, just by getting the degree of conditioning
right.
5. Mechanism of the Biological Effect of Conditioned Water
We set out to investigate this in yeast by adding either conditioned or
non-conditioned water to the cultures and found that conditioned water
increased the rate of cell division. Again, there was a maximum response when
the water had been conditioned for about 30 seconds, with longer periods being
inhibitory; i.e. it was just like the effect on wheat roots. What was
happening? We had conditioned the water in a weak pulsating field of the order
of microtesla, which is far too low to provide the extra energy needed for the
growth effects. Instead it must be acting on a cellular control mechanism.
Perhaps there is a link between this and the ability of conditioned water to
remove limescale. If conditioned water can remove calcium ions from limescale,
could it not also remove some of the calcium ions that normally cross-link the
negatively charged phospholipids in cell membranes? Phospholipids form the
bulk of most cell membranes, which are only two molecules thick. The removal
of the positively charged calcium ions that help bind them together would
loosen the membrane structure and increase its permeability. If this resulted
in extra free calcium leaking into the cell from outside (normally there is
about a thousand times greater concentration of calcium on the outside than on
the inside), it could stimulate metabolism and cell multiplication (cells
normally regulate their rate of metabolism by controlling their internal
calcium concentration). We checked on this by repeating the experiment in the
presence of toxic heavy metal ions. This time the conditioned water inhibited
cell multiplication, suggesting that there was indeed an increase in
permeability, but this was now letting in more of the toxic ions.
6. Relationship to the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields.
There are now a vast number of publications linking exposure to
electromagnetic fields to various biological effects, at almost all levels of
evolution, including man. In humans, they range from effects on brain function
to the promotion of cancer and (amongst other things) have given cause for
concern about the health effects of using mobile phones and various domestic
appliances. However, there is as yet no proven explanation for the mechanism.
But perhaps we now have one, based on our studies of conditioned water. I was
struck by the similarity between our own results, with electromagnetically
conditioned water, and those of many other workers who had applied similar
electromagnetic fields directly to living organisms (including yeast). Perhaps
we were looking at the same thing.
It would be quite reasonable to expect weak electromagnetic fields to also
affect colloids in living cells so that they too could withdraw calcium from
cell membranes, just like those in conditioned tap water. In this case, the
internal membranes should also be affected, resulting in the release of extra
calcium from calcium stores inside the cell as well as from outside. However,
they should both affect metabolism in a similar way and give similar effects.
This explains the very widespread but often inconsistent effects of weak
electromagnetic fields. They are widespread because the control of metabolism
by calcium appears to be universal in the animal and plant kingdoms. They are
often inconsistent because calcium affects cells in many different ways. It
tends be stimulate metabolism, but this can have a variety of effects
depending on the nature of the cell, its physiological condition and what
biochemical pathways and genes are available for activation. In addition, as
we have discovered in yeast and wheat that it is possible to overdo the
treatment, e.g. by conditioning the water for a too long a time. This may let
in too much calcium, and there seems to be a stress response with growth being
inhibited.
It is tempting to speculate from these results that intermittent exposure to
weak time varying electromagnetic fields may not be totally harmful to living
organisms (including human beings). By stimulating metabolism, they may even
be beneficial. However, prolonged exposure may induce stress responses. A
further risk is that the increase metabolic rate may induce dormant but
potentially cancerous cells in present some individuals to proliferate, which
may account for the increase in the incidence of cancer in a small proportion
of populations exposed to electromagnetic fields [see Goldsworthy, Whitney and
Morris, 1999].
Selected Publications:
GOLDSWORTHY, A 1984 The cell electric. New Scientist 102 (1407), 14-15.
GOLDSWORTHY, A 1987 Why trees are green. New Scientist 116 (1590), 48-52.
MINA, MG and GOLDSWORTHY, A 1992 Electrical polarization of tobacco cells by
Ca2+ ion channels. J. Exptl. Bot. 43, 449-454.
GOLDSWORTHY, A 1995 Photorespiration. In "Production and Improvement of Crops
for Drylands". Ed. Gupta, U.S. (Oxford & IBH Publishing Co., New Delhi).
GOLDSWORTHY, A 1996 Electrostimulation of cells by weak electric currents. In
"Electrical Manipulation of Cells". Eds. Lynch, P., Davey, M.R. (Chapman and
Hall, New York).
GOLDSWORTHY, A, WHITNEY, H and MORRIS, E 1999 Biological effects of physically
conditioned water. Water Research 33, 1618-1626.
Contact Details:
Dr A Goldsworthy
Plant Technology
Department of Biological Sciences
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
Sir Alexander Fleming Building
South Kensington
London SW7 2AZ
Tel: +44 (020) 7594 5361
E-mail:
a.goldsworthy@ic.ac.uk 
