For 11 years, Jill Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley, has collected and studied the microbes that slime the floors of mines and convert iron to acid, a common source of stream pollution around the world. Imagine her surprise, then, when research scientist Brett Baker discovered three new microbes living amidst the bacteria she thought she knew well. All three were so small - the size of large viruses - as to be virtually invisible under a microscope, and belonged to a totally new phylum of Archaea, microorganisms that have been around for billions of years. What made Baker's find possible was shotgun sequencing, a technique developed and made famous by Celera Corp., which used it to sequence the human genome in record time. "It was amazing," said Banfield, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley since 2001. "These were totally new and very small organisms we didn't know how to culture with standard techniques. This shows the great promise of shotgun sequencing to profile a community of organisms without making any assumptions about what is there." Baker's discovery makes clear that shotgun sequencing can also pick out rare organisms too small to see easily, and too novel to be plucked out by other genetic techniques. Banfield noted that the bacteria and newfound Archaea living in the highly acidic mine drainage are archetypes of the kind of life that could exist on other planets, such as in the iron- and sulfur-rich soil of Mars. "This community of microbes is relevant to probing potential strategies for life on other planets, especially the life likely to exist on Mars," she said. The organisms in the mine drainage, which live in a pink slick on pools of acidic green water, obtain energy by oxidizing iron - that is, generating rust -- and in the process create sulfuric acid and dissolve pyrite (iron sulfide or fool's gold) to release more iron and sulfur. This self-sustaining process creates the acidic drainage that pollutes creeks and rivers, including those around the researchers' study site, the Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, Calif. The mine is one of the largest Superfund sites in the country. Banfield has been trying to understand how the extremophiles - microbes that live in extreme environments - live together and generate the acid drainage that makes such mines toxic hazards. The green runoff from the mine, captured and treated by the Environmental Protection Agency, is a hot 108 degrees Fahrenheit, as acidic as battery acid, and loaded with toxic metals - zinc, iron, copper and arsenic. These therefore could be the smallest organisms ever found, though Baker needs to culture them before confirming this. Because they're so small, however, they may not be free-living. "We're not sure they can live independently, whether they have enough genes to fend for themselves, but instead are symbiotic with another organism or are feeding off another organism," Baker said. Baker now is trying to find the right conditions for these Archaea to thrive in a culture dish. For now, he has dubbed them ARMAN-1, -2 and -3, for Archaeal Richmond Mine Acidophilic Nanoorganisms. Read more…

On two occasions on Monday night 17-year-old Chris Moran spotted strange lights in the skies over Swindon. It was at 8.55pm when he made his first sighting.Chris said: "We were walking out the back of Cricklade Road near some open ground and out of the corner of my eye I saw it for just a few seconds."There was this oval-shaped object, quite bright, hanging in the sky. It was really odd."As I turned my head to look at it, it reacted like it had been seen, and it zoomed off."Chris turned to his friends but they all insisted that they didn't see it.But just over an hour later there could be no doubt in their minds."I was in town near Eastcott Hill and I saw it again, and this time so did the others," said Chris."It looked like it was just a few hundred feet up. All the guys saw it and so did one man who had come out of a pub."It was incredible, but I cannot begin to think what it was."It was oval again, a bit like a rugby ball, completely silent, and then travelled off so fast, it would have been impossible to estimate its speed. I cannot believe I have seen this object twice in one night. Other people must have seen it."Chris is confident what he saw was not an aircraft, helicopter or an astronomical object such as a shooting star."It seemed far too fast for anything I have ever heard of and it was silent, there was no rumbling or anything," he said.A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence said they had not received any reports about UFO sightings over Swindon on Monday evening.Did you see this strange phenomena over Swindon? If so call the Adver newsdesk on 01793 501806. Read more…

Received a submission report from Sam on December 21, 2006. He lives in Detroit, Michigan and believes he experienced two UFO sightings on the last Wednesday and Thursday of November 2000. Read more…

Ramu was a tapper in a rubber plantation in Malaysia. He was about twenty eight, married with two kids. He was an extremely handsome man with a physique to match. Read more…

AP - Heavy rains damaged several adobe walls in the ancient ruins of Chan Chan, the world's largest mud city on Peru's northern coast, the newspaper El Comercio reported Saturday. Read more…

AP - The San Francisco Zoo has closed its Lion House, an exhibit where the public can watch the big cats eat a meal, while officials investigate the mauling of a keeper by a Siberian tiger. Read more…

Research by the Human Pain Research Group at the University of Manchester suggests that people's responses to placebo or "dummy" pain relief varies according to their way of thinking. A group of 40 pain-free volunteers took part in an experiment funded by the Arthritis Research Campaign using an artificial pain stimulus, and were led to expect reduced pain after the application of a cream which was actually a placebo. Read more…

The fossils of a dinosaur that measured as long as an NBA basketball court were recently recovered in Spain. Read more…

Like good stock brokers, red squirrels predict when the market will be flooded with seeds and then invest big by producing a second litter of young, a new study finds. Read more…

When a white-handed gibbon spots a lurking leopard, rather than high tailing it in the opposite direction, the furry ape will actually draw closer to its foe and belt out a song. Read more…

AFP - A 12-year-old quest to find planets orbiting other stars gets a big boost this week with the launch of a French-made spacecraft that may help reveal a home-from-home for our descendants. Read more…

AFP - A Japanese zoo had some extra Christmas cheer as it celebrated the winter birth of twin giant panda cubs, a rarity for the famously infertile animals. Read more…

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AP - For years, Lloyd Nelson laughed off as myth reports that armadillos — those armored, football-sized critters with the big claws and bigger nose — had waddled their way into southern Illinois, the same place folks say they've seen cougars. Read more…

AP - A wild elephant looking for food killed three people and injured 10 on Sunday in a forest range in eastern India, police said. Read more…

AP - Mei Mei, a giant panda from China, gave birth to twins at a zoo in western Japan, and the mother and babies were in good condition, a zoo official said Sunday. Read more…

AP - Two years after an earthquake off western Indonesia unleashed a monster tsunami, scientists expect the same fault to rupture again within the next few decades — and this town stands to take the full force of the waves. Read more…

You don't need to sign up for pricey wine appreciation classes to parse the subtle difference between the bouquet of a pinot noir and a cabernet. Just pour yourself a couple glasses and sniff. Your brain will quickly help you become a modest oenophile. A new study by Northwestern University shows that the brain learns to differentiate between similar smells simply through passive experience. The study also revealed for the first time where the brain updates information about smells. Read more…

New research into the way the Antarctic ice sheet adds ice to the ocean reveals that tidal motion influences the flow of the one of the biggest ice streams draining the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Read more…

Patients with advanced cancer that has spread to many different sites often do not have many treatment options, since they would be unable to tolerate the doses of treatment they would need to kill the tumors. Read more…

The 27th research campaign of Bremerhaven's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research marks the beginning of the summer research season in the Antarctic. The institute collaborates with 20 research institutions and ten logistics organisations from 14 countries. Neumayer Station will serve as the logistical base for extensive measurements using aircraft. An expedition aboard research icebreaker Polarstern is travelling along the Antarctic Peninsula as part of the global "Census of Marine Life." Read more…

Pregnant and nursing women who eat generous amounts of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage could help protect their children from cancer, both as infants and later in life. A new study done with laboratory mice found that phytochemicals found in certain vegetables provided a very high level of protection against leukemia and lymphoma in young animals, and also significantly protected against lung cancer during the rodent's equivalent of middle age. Read more…

The belief that mistletoe can help treat cancer is a myth which can cause harm, warn doctors in this week's Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal. The warning follows the case of a cancer patient who attended hospital with a tumour-like growth under the skin induced by mistletoe. Read more…

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have analyzed samples from Comet Wild 2, as part of NASA's Stardust mission, the first solid sample return mission since Apollo. Over 100 scientists at various institutions participated in the preliminary analysis. NRL contributed to the Mineralogy and Petrology, Crater, Bulk Chemistry and Isotope analysis teams by studying the structure and composition of the comet samples using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Read more…

Don't believe in Santa Claus? If you're skeptical of Santa's abilities to deliver presents to millions of homes and children in just one night, North Carolina State University's Dr. Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, can explain the plausible science and engineering principles that could allow the Jolly Old Elf to pull off the magical feat year after year. Read more…