Briny deep basin may be home to animals thriving without oxygen

Daniel Lacks, a materials physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, says the new study could be identifying one of several mechanisms at work in particle clouds. In earlier work, Lacks showed that electrical charging depends on the size of particles in question, with smaller particles tending to charge negatively and larger particles tending to charge positively. Office 2007 makes life great!

“The bottom line is that something is needed to break the symmetry when two particles of identical composition collide, in order for one particle to charge negatively and the other to charge positively,” he says. For particles of different sizes, he says his mechanism might be in play; for identically sized particles, the new model might explain it.

Some challenges remain, such as explaining where the background electric field that charges the particles came from. But Herrmann says the work is philosophically satisfying, in answering a long-held question, and may yet have practical applications.  Office 2007 download is on sale now!

The claim is startling and the evidence indirect, but marine biologists seem open to the idea that multicellular animals can live without oxygen.

Three species of loriciferan, a creature that sounds and looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, appear to go their whole lives without oxygen, researchers report online April 6 in BMC Biology.

“This discovery is truly exceptional,” says invertebrate biologist Gonzalo Giribet of Harvard University, who was not part of the study.

Pulled out of a briny, sulfurous hellhole 3.5 kilometers below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, the newfound creatures look like tiny cups with tentacles sticking out. Loriciferans are real, multicellular animals though, so different from other creatures that the tiny marine oddballs have their own phylum on a par with mollusks and arthropods.

Until now, biologists had expected only one-celled organisms such as bacteria to thrive in oxygen-depleted places. Multicellular animals were known to pass through or hunker down temporarily in environments without oxygen, but in all cases needed to have it in some way at some time.  Office 2010 key is for you now!