STATUS REPORT Date Released: Thursday, November 18, 2004 Source: NASA HQ Notice of Establishment of the NASA Robotic and Human Exploration of Mars Strategic Roadmapping Committee [Federal Register: November 18, 2004 (Volume 69, Number 222)] [Notices] [Page 67610-67611] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr18no04-126] NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION [Notice 04-127] NASA Advisory Council; Notice of Establishment Pursuant to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C. App. Sec. Sec. 1 et seq. AGENCY: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Explanation of Need: The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has determined that the establishment of a NASA Robotic and Human Exploration of Mars Strategic Roadmapping Committee is necessary and in the public interest in connection with the performance of duties imposed upon NASA by law. This determination follows consultation with the Committee Management Secretariat, General Services Administration. Name of Committee: NASA Robotic and Human Exploration of Mars Strategic Roadmapping Committee. Purpose and Objective: The Committee will advise NASA Administrator on Mars exploration, including robotic exploration of Mars to search for evidence of life, to understand the history of the solar system, and to prepare for future human exploration. The Committee will draw on the expertise of its members and other sources to provide its advice and recommendations to the Agency. The Committee will hold meetings and make site visits as necessary to accomplish their responsibilities. The Committee will function solely as an advisory board and will comply fully with the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Lack of Duplication of Resources: The Committee's functions cannot be performed by the agency, another existing committee, or other means such as a public meeting. Fairly Balanced Membership: The Committee will consist of a balance of experts from within the government, private industry, and academia. In addition, there may be additional experts selected for Subcommittees or Task Forces. Members of the Committee, Subcommittee or Task Forces will be chosen from among industry, academia, and government with recognized knowledge and expertise in specific areas across the NASA's portfolio. Total membership will reflect a fairly balanced view. Duration: Ad hoc. Responsible NASA Official: Dr. Marc Allen, Advanced Planning and Integration Office, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 300 E Street, SW., Washington, DC 20546, telephone (202) 358-0733. P. Diane Rausch, Advisory Committee Management Officer, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. [FR Doc. 04-25553 Filed 11-17-04; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 7510-01-P http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=14541

Life's There, You Just Need to Dig Summary - (Nov 18, 2004) Scientists believed they'd finally reached the limits of microbial life with the heart of the Atacama desert in Chile. This desert is so dry, parts of it only receive one rainfall every decade or so, and NASA uses it as a model for the search for life on Mars. But researchers from the University of Arizona have discovered that life's here too. They dug up soil samples from 20 to 30 cm (8 to 12 inches) below ground, and then added completely sterile water and let the samples sit for 10 days. They were then able to grow unusual bacteria from the samples and analyze their DNA. Full Story - Image credit: NASA A place so barren that NASA uses it as a model for the Martian environment, Chile's Atacama desert gets rain maybe once a decade. In 2003, scientists reported that the driest Atacama soils were sterile. Not so, reports a team of Arizona scientists. Bleak though it may be, microbial life lurks beneath the arid surface of the Atacama's absolute desert. "We found life, we can culture it, and we can extract and look at its DNA," said Raina Maier, a professor of soil, water and environmental science at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The work from her team contradicts last year's widely reported study that asserted the "Mars-like soils" of the Atacama's core were the equivalent of the "dry limit of microbial life." Maier said, "We are saying, 'What is the dry limit of life?' We haven't reached it yet." The Arizona researchers will publish their findings as a letter in the Nov. 19 issue of the journal Science. Maier's co-authors include UA researchers Kevin Drees, Julie Neilson, David Henderson and Jay Quade and U.S. Geological Survey paleoecologist Julio Betancourt. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Environmental and Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. The project began not as a search for current life but rather as an attempt to peer into the past and reconstruct the history of the region's plant communities. Betancourt and Quade, a UA professor of geosciences, have been conducting research in the Atacama for the past seven years. Some parts of the Atacama have vegetation, but the absolute desert of the Atacama's core -- an area Betancourt describes as "just dirt and rocks" -- has none. Nor does the area have cliffs which harbor ancient piles of vegetation, known as middens, collected and stored by long-gone rodents. Researchers use such fossil plant remains to tell what grew in a place long ago. So to figure out whether the area had ever been vegetated, Quade and Betancourt had to search the soil for biologically produced minerals such as carbonates. To rule out the possibility that such soil minerals were being produced by present-day microorganisms, the two geoscientists teamed up with UA environmental microbiologist Maier. In October of 2002, the researchers collected sterile soil samples along a 200-kilometer (120 miles) transect that ran from an elevation of 4,500 meters (almost 15,000 feet) to sea level. Every 300 meters (about 1,000 feet) along the transect, the team dug a pit and took two soil samples from a depth of 20 to 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches). To ensure the sample was sterile, every time he took the sample, Betancourt had to clean his hand trowel with Lysol. "When it's still, it's not a problem," he said. "But when the wind's blowing at 40 miles per hour, it's a little more complicated." The geoscientists brought their test tubes full of desert soil back to Maier's lab, where her team wetted the soil samples with sterile water, let them sit for 10 days, and then grew bacteria from them. "We brought 'em back alive, it turns out," Betancourt said. Maier and her team have not yet identified the bacteria that come from the extremely arid environment of the Atacama's core. She can say they are unusual. She said, "As a microbiologist, I am interested in how these microbial communities evolve and respond. Can we discover new microbial activities in such extreme environments? Are those activities something we can exploit?" The team's findings suggest that how researchers look for life on Mars may affect whether life is found on the Red Planet. The other researchers who had tested soil from the Atacama had looked for life only down to the depth of four inches. So one rule, Quade quipped, is, "Don't just scratch the surface." Saying that Mars researchers are most likely looking for a needle in a very large haystack, Maier said, "If you aren't very careful about your Mars protocol, you could miss life that's there." Peter H. Smith, the UA planetary scientist who is the principal investigator for the upcoming Phoenix mission to Mars, said, "Scientists on the Phoenix Mission suspect that there are regions on Mars, arid like the Atacama Desert in Chile, that are conducive to microbial life." He added, "We will attempt an experiment similar to Maier's group on Mars during the summer of 2008." As for Maier and her colleagues, Betancourt said, "We're very, very interested in life on Earth and how it functions." Maier suspects the microbes may persist in a state of suspended animation during the Atacama Desert's multi-decadal dry spells. So the team's next step is to return to Chile and do experiments on-site. One option is what Maier calls "making our own rainfall event" -- adding water to the Atacama's soils -- and seeing whether the team could then detect microbial activity. Original Source: UA News Release http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/life_there_dig.html?18112004

PRESS RELEASE Date Released: Friday, November 26, 2004 Source: Current Opinion in Chemical Biology Water is not an essential ingredient for Life, scientists now claim Billions of dollars are pumped into extraterrestrial exploration each year in the search for the ultimate prize - the discovery of life on other planets. But are we looking in all the right places? Prof Steven A Benner, who is working with NASA on the design of the next generation of Mars probes, believes that life could flourish without any need for water. In the December issue of Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, he and his colleagues at the University of Florida describe how organisms could survive in exotic environments such as on Saturn's moon Titan. Benner and colleagues identify just two absolute requirements for life to exist: a suitable temperature range to allow chemical bonding, and an energy source (for example, the sun or radioactive decay). This contrasts with the common belief that life absolutely requires liquid water. Indeed, the authors speculate on the possibilities of life emerging in cold, icy environments, just like that of Titan, which meets both requirements and many 'weaker' ones. "Life may even exist in more exotic environments, such as the supercritical dihydrogen-helium mixtures found on gas giants," speculates Prof Benner, referring to the large gaseous planets such as Jupiter and Saturn. He even wonders if we may have missed exotic forms of life here on Earth. "This question is not as absurd as it might seem," says Benner. "Just 50 years ago...life in the deep ocean was not known." Titan, currently being studied by the Cassini space probe, is perhaps an ideal place to look for life. The stunning pictures and data already sent back from the moon suggest a world of yellow clouds and oily black methane lakes, an environment that is thought to resemble that of the Earth billions of years ago. This puzzling moon is too cold for large quantities of liquid water to exist, however, which for many probably rules out life. Humans and, indeed, simple bacteria are mostly made up of water, so it is difficult to envisage life without it. But Benner believes this focus on water can blinker the search. "Why not use the hydrocarbons that are naturally liquid on Titan as a solvent for life directly?," he muses. "In many senses, hydrocarbon solvents are better than water for managing complex organic chemical reactivity." We will soon know more. Next month, the European-built Huygens probe will detach from Cassini and touch down, or perhaps splash down, on Titan's surface. "The Huygens mission will be the first real input into this field for some time. Its potential for providing an 'Aha!' experience with respect to weird life is enormous," says Benner. All life on Earth is widely supposed to have descended from a common ancestor. One consequence of this is that every organism uses the same general biochemistry. For example, all forms of life make use of proteins made from the same set of building blocks. But this may not be the only way to do things. Could creatures exist elsewhere in the Universe with a completely different biochemistry? Experiments in recent years have partly addressed such questions by re-engineering protein and DNA systems. For example, alternative amino acids to those found in living systems are capable of standing in for their natural counterparts. Professor Benner and colleagues now provide a wide-ranging exploration of just how far the chemistry of life can be pushed. "Is water necessary? Is carbon essential? Why not silicon?," asks Benner. One of the leading theories on the origins of life supposes that the earliest organisms used RNA instead of DNA to pass on their genetic information and to catalyse reactions. If this is correct, it demonstrates that alternative biochemistries are indeed possible. Benner suggests that 'RNA organisms' might still exist. Because such life forms would not need the biochemical machinery to produce proteins, they would be much smaller than bacteria, hinting at possible environments we might look for them in. "Many minerals have pores that are smaller than one micron across. These might hold smaller RNA organisms," says Benner. While more exotic worlds might well harbour life, Mars remains the best bet. "There was water on Mars when there was life on Earth," Benner points out. "This would not be particularly weird life, of course, in that it would be living in water, but it could easily be weird by Earth standards." However, Benner concedes that "a simple 'We don't know' is often the best answer for some questions. "Until life is encountered elsewhere, or aliens contact us, we will not have an independent second dataset. We may not even then, if the alien life itself shares an ancestor with life on Earth." End Contact details Prof. Steven A Benner, Department of Chemistry, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-7200, USA Tel: 352 392 7773 e-mail: [email protected] Current Opinion in Chemical Biology is a review journal covering all aspects of the interface between chemistry and biology. Each issue contains articles themed around a particular subject of current interest. The article described above is from a section on the Molecular origins of life, edited by Nicholas V Hud and David G Lynn. For more information on the journal or to request the full text of the article, please contact the in-house editor Matt Brown at [email protected]. You can view the current issue at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13675931 http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15568

Would We Mistake Signals from ET? Summary - (Dec 2, 2004) Researchers from the University of Michigan think that the current programs to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) might not be able to distinguish signals from the noise of nearby stars. They showed how an efficient message sent through radio waves is nearly indistinguishable from the ordinary thermal radiation coming from stars. If extraterrestrial civilizations have been transmitting for a long time, they'll probably have optimized their communications to save power, and so we won't recognize it when we hear it. Full Story - If ET ever phones home, chances are Earthlings wouldn't recognize the call as anything other than random noise or a star. New research shows that highly efficient electromagnetic transmissions from our neighbors in space would resemble the thermal radiation emitted by stars. University of Michigan physicist Mark Newman, along with biologist Michael Lachmann and computer scientist Cristopher Moore, have extended the pioneering 1940s research of Claude Shannon to electromagnetic transmissions in a paper published last month in the American Journal of Physics called, "The Physical Limits of Communication, or Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise." Lachmann is at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany; Moore is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Shannon showed that a message transmitted with optimal efficiency is indistinguishable from random noise to a receiver unfamiliar with the language in the message. For example, an e-mail message whose first few letters are AAAAA contains little information because the reader can easily guess what probably comes next—another A. The message is totally non-random. On the other hand, a message beginning with a sequence of letters like RPLUOFQX contains a lot of information because you cannot easily guess the next letter. Paradoxically, however, the same message could just be a random jumble of letters containing no information at all; if you don't know the code used for the message you can't tell the difference between an information-rich message and a random jumble of letters. Newman and his collaborators have shown that a similar result holds true for radio waves. When electromagnetic waves are used as the transmission medium, the most information efficient format for a message is indistinguishable from ordinary thermal radiation—the same kind of radio waves that are emitted by hot bodies like stars. In other words, an efficiently coded radio message coming from outer space would look no different from a normal star in the sky. So, suppose an alien in space decided to pick up signs of Earth life. It would have a pretty easy time of it, since our radio and television signals are zigzagging all over the place and are inefficiently coded and easily distinguishable from stars. But say a human tries to tune into extraterrestrial life. "People do this, and when they do, they are looking for non-random stuff," Newman said. "But what if (the aliens) have gotten it down? With a few hundred years practice at doing this, you'd have discovered the most efficient way to encode your radio messages. So to us, their communication would look just like another star, a hot object." After all, Newman said, in the universe's 12 billion-year history, it's likely that extraterrestrials—if they exist—have communicated with each other longer than our paltry 80-year history of radio broadcasting. "In which case, they've probably gotten very good at this by now." Said Newman: "Our message is that, even for the people who do believe this, they're probably wasting their time. If they did pick up a signal from little green men, it would probably look like a star to them and they would just pass over it and move on to the next thing." Original Source: UMich News Release http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/mistake_et_signals.html?2122004

Earthlings' Low Signal-to-Noise? Summary (Dec 05, 2004): Our most efficient attempts to broadcast our planet's existence to another civilization would resemble the thermal radiation emitted by stars. By analogy, more advanced worlds would likely do the same, making our chances of listening in hard to distinguish from hearing stellar noise. Display Options: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Earthlings' Low Signal-to-Noise? Managing Stellar Noise based on U. Michigan report Arecibo. World's largest dish, radio telescope. Puerto Rico. If ET ever phones home, chances are Earthlings wouldn't recognize the call as anything other than random noise or a star. New research shows that highly efficient electromagnetic transmissions from our neighbors in space would resemble the thermal radiation emitted by stars. University of Michigan physicist Mark Newman, along with biologist Michael Lachmann and computer scientist Cristopher Moore, have extended the pioneering 1940s research of Claude Shannon to electromagnetic transmissions in a paper published last month in the American Journal of Physics called, "The Physical Limits of Communication, or Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise." Lachmann is at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany; Moore is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Their title echoes the well-known characterization by Sir Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Shannon showed that a message transmitted with optimal efficiency is indistinguishable from random noise to a receiver unfamiliar with the language in the message. For example, an e-mail message whose first few letters are AAAAA contains little information because the reader can easily guess what probably comes next--another A. The message is totally non-random. On the other hand, a message beginning with a sequence of letters like RPLUOFQX contains a lot of information because you cannot easily guess the next letter. Allen Telescope Array (ATA) Paradoxically, however, the same message could just be a random jumble of letters containing no information at all; if you don't know the code used for the message you can't tell the difference between an information-rich message and a random jumble of letters. Newman and his collaborators have shown that a similar result holds true for radio waves. When electromagnetic waves are used as the transmission medium, the most information efficient format for a message is indistinguishable from ordinary thermal radiation--the same kind of radio waves that are emitted by hot bodies like stars. In other words, an efficiently coded radio message coming from outer space would look no different from a normal star in the sky. So, suppose an alien in space decided to pick up signs of Earth life. It would have a pretty easy time of it, since our radio and television signals are zigzagging all over the place and are inefficiently coded and easily distinguishable from stars. But say a human tries to tune into extraterrestrial life. Square Kilometer Array (SKA) "People do this, and when they do, they are looking for non-random stuff," Newman said. "But what if (the aliens) have gotten it down? With a few hundred years practice at doing this, you'd have discovered the most efficient way to encode your radio messages. So to us, their communication would look just like another star, a hot object." After all, Newman said, in the universe's 12 billion-year history, it's likely that extraterrestrials--if they exist--have communicated with each other longer than our paltry 80-year history of radio broadcasting. "In which case, they've probably gotten very good at this by now." Said Newman: "Our message is that, even for the people who do believe this, they're probably wasting their time. If they did pick up a signal from little green men, it would probably look like a star to them and they would just pass over it and move on to the next thing." http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1331.html

09/Oct/04 ¿Contribuyeron los volcanes a originar la vida? El gas arrojado por los volcanes prehistóricos podría haber ayudado a florecer a las primeras formas de vida, dicen los químicos. Se cree que el sulfuro de carbonilo (COS) podría haber sido útil para juntar los primeros componentes moleculares biológicos. (Science, Nature) - El descubrimiento potencialmente puede responder una de las preguntas más molestas acerca de los orígenes de la vida: ¿Cómo aparecieron las primeras moléculas biológicas complejas, dado que no había entonces organismos cerca que las produjeran? Reza Ghadiri y sus colegas, del Instituto de Investigación Scripps en La Jolla, California, sugieren que el gas volcánico podría ser el responsable de la creación de las primeras proteínas rudimentarias. En el laboratorio, el sulfuro de carbonilo (COS) puede ligar aminoácidos en cadenas denominadas péptidos, con cuyos filamentos se entretejen las proteínas. El equipo de Ghadiri expuso aminoácidos al COS a temperatura ambiente. Los investigadores informan en el ejemplar de esta semana de Science que las cadenas péptidas se producían en cuestión de horas, o incluso en minutos. Más aún, las cadenas se pudieron crear mediante varios diferentes procesos químicos, como por ejemplo oxidación, alquilización y catálisis metálica. Simplificando "Esto es química muy simple y eficiente", dice Ghadiri. "Las velocidades de reacción son rápidas y pueden llevarse a cabo mediante múltiples caminos". Si ocurrieron procesos similares cuando la Tierra era joven, los mismos podrían haber hecho a la vida ir hacia una bioquímica más compleja. Y el COS pudo haber sido un insumo abundante en los primeros días de la vida, sugieren los investigadores. Hoy, este compuesto constituye el 0,1 por ciento del gas emitido por los volcanes. "No está claro qué concentración de COS pudo haber en la atmósfera prebiótica, pero probablemente fue significativa", afirma Ghadiri. Esto significa que las regiones cercanas a los volcanes pueden haber sido cunas de la vida, sugiere Ghadiri. "La reacción habría ocurrido cerca de la emisión de gas, como en los lagos con volcanes o en áreas donde hubiere emisión subacuática de gas volcánico, como en los respiraderos profundos". Esta teoría no está demostrada en absoluto. Después de todo, no sabemos a ciencia cierta cuánto COS había hace tres mil millones de años, cuando se cree que la vida hizo su primera aparición en el mundo. Pero el estudio muestra que el COS califica como el posible agente químico capaz de ligar aminoácidos. Tampoco sabemos, por supuesto, cómo es que los aminoácidos aparecieron allí en primer lugar. Los expertos están actualmente divididos entre quienes creen que nacieron en la Tierra, y quienes creen que fueron lanzados como en paracaídas desde algún otro sitio. "Los aminoácidos pudieron formarse en la Tierra bajo condiciones prebióticas diferentes y plausibles", dice Ghadiri. "Pero sólo se los ha encontrado en meteoritos, de modo que también pudieron haber sido traídos hacia la Tierra desde otro lado". Referencias Leman L., Orgel L. & Ghardiri M. R. Science, 306. 283 - 286 (2004). Seleccionado y Traducido por Laura Siri, equipo Axxón Fuente: Nature News Service Más datos: Nature http://axxon.com.ar/not/143/c-1430076.htm

Descubren cómo se puede vivir sin oxígeno. Tendencias21.net - El estudio pormenorizado de un pez capaz de vivir hasta cuatro meses sin oxígeno y con una actividad cardiaca normal, reveló a la ciencia el secreto mejor guardado de la naturaleza. Este pez, conocido como Carpa Crucian, transforma el ácido láctico, fabricado por el organismo cuando escasea el oxígeno, en etanol, que es mucho menos nocivo, y lo hace llegar con el impulso cardiaco a las branquias para expulsarlo al entorno. El descubrimiento puede tener importantes aplicaciones médicas, particularmente en el ámbito de la cardiología. Investigadores del laboratorio de zoología de la Universidad de Columbia Británica han descubierto el secreto de un pez que es capaz de vivir sin respirar, según explican en un artículo que publica la revista Science Se trata de una especie de pez conocido como Carpa Crucian (Carassius carassius) que habita en aguas escandinavas y que posee un sistema respiratorio particular: puede vivir hasta cuatro meses sin oxígeno. Después de someterlo a observación durante tres semanas, los investigadores pudieron descubrir que este pez conserva su ritmo cardiaco sin aportación de oxígeno transformando el ácido láctico, fabricado por el organismo cuando escasea el oxígeno, en etanol, que es mucho menos nocivo. El ácido láctico es producido cuando el suministro de energía aeróbica es menor que la demandada por el cuerpo. Esta situación genera una acumulación de ácido láctico en el músculo que es la que produce la fatiga durante un periodo de ejercicio muscular. Al transformar el ácido láctico, los pulsos cardiacos regulares permiten al etanol circular por la corriente sanguínea hasta las branquias, desde donde es expulsado de nuevo al medio ambiente. Aplicaciones médicas La mayoría de los vertebrados mueren en menos de un minuto por carencia de oxígeno, mientras que otros sobreviven suprimiendo toda la actividad cardiaca. Esta especie de pez, sin embargo, ha desarrollado un sistema que le permite mantenerse vivo sin oxígeno y con actividad cardiaca en todo momento. Es la primera vez que se descubre este mecanismo de supervivencia en los vertebrados, que por su importancia puede tener aplicaciones en medicina. En los casos de trasplantes cardiacos, por ejemplo, sólo se dispone de unas horas para trasplantar el corazón del donante al receptor. Si este tiempo pudiera ampliarse de alguna forma imitando al pez, quizás muchas vidas humanas podrían salvarse. Al igual que los demás vertebrados, los seres humanos perecen en cuestión de minutos si se les priva de oxígeno (anoxia), en gran medida en virtud de un paro cardíaco. Sin embargo, algunas tortugas pueden vivir sin oxigeno a bajas temperaturas, aunque suspendiendo drásticamente la actividad cardiaca y el control cardiovascular autónomo. El caso de la Carpa Crucia es más sorprendente, ya que comparte la tolerancia a la anoxia con una habilidad única en los vertebrados, mantener el ritmo cardiaco normal en estas circunstancias, así como la regulación cardiovascular, como mínimo durante cinco días. Nuevas vías de investigación Para los investigadores, el descubrimiento del mecanismo natural que permite esta insólita proeza desvela la capacidad de la naturaleza para tolerar la ausencia de oxígeno sin interrumpir el ritmo cardiaco, lo que abre sugerentes vías de exploración a otras escalas biológicas más complejas. El equipo de investigadores utilizó redes para capturar estas carpas, que luego fueron trasladadas al laboratorio, donde las depositaron en agua con poco oxígeno y a ocho grados Celsius de temperatura. Descubrieron que, a pesar de la falta de oxígeno, el corazón de estos peces bombeaba normalmente, lo que señala una capacidad necesaria para vivir sin oxígeno: tener un corazón fuerte, capaz de bombear el etanol incluso en entornos con escasos niveles de oxígeno. Diferentes modos de vida Cuando comenzó la vida, todos los organismos eran forzosamente anaeróbicos; es decir, no respiraban oxígeno porque no lo había en grandes cantidades, aunque al aumentar su volumen la atmósfera se volvió oxidante. En ese momento evolutivo, un grupo de organismos se desarrolló en ambientes sin oxígeno, ya en el fondo del mar o en las profundidades de la tierra, dando origen a los organismos anaeróbicos estrictos (cuyas funciones no dependen del oxígeno). Otros, a su vez, perfeccionaron algunos mecanismos de supervivencia convirtiéndose en organismos "facultativos", que en ausencia de oxígeno viven mediante otros medios, como por ejemplo la fermentación. Finalmente, otro grupo de organismos aprovechó el potencial electrónico de ese elemento, surgiendo así los organismos aeróbicos estrictos (que no pueden vivir sin oxígeno). El descubrimiento de los mecanismos de la Carpa Crucian para sobrevivir sin oxígeno y sin interrumpir la actividad cardiaca, abre a los organismos aeróbicos estrictos, entre los que se encuentran los humanos, la posibilidad de explorar estados de vida que temporalmente no consuman oxígeno. Trascender la biología Esta investigación se enmarca en el contexto de un conjunto de trabajos que pretenden descubrir formas de vida o estados que permitan trascender los límites biológicos que nos ha proporcionado la evolución. A título de ejemplo, se pueden citar algunas investigaciones que han ofrecido resultados concretos. Por un lado, se ha multiplicado por seis el tiempo de vida de un gusano mediante manipulación genética, tal como publicamos en otro artículo en Tendencias, así como se ha creado en laboratorio la primera forma de vida sintética , todo ello con vistas a profundizar en el conocimiento de los mecanismos de la longevidad y de la vida. Por último, el Pentágono indaga medios para que sus soldados puedan vivir varios días sin comida y en combate, tal como informó Wired . Objetivo: impulsar el desarrollo de soldados de infantería con un gran nivel de inmunidad a las necesidades humanas normales. Eduardo Martínez http://www.prodownload.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1514