Thirty thousand years is a long time to hang out in any one place, much less stuck inside a tiny salt crystal. But microbiologist Brian Schubert says he found just that in a crystal from sediments in Death Valley—bacteria-like archaeans that have lived inside the tiny enclosure for all those years.

The researchers announced in a paper in Geology that they could culture the archaeans in the liquid from inside the crystal, liquid they estimate to be 22,000 to 34,000 years old. Previous studies suggesting even longer lives for microbes stuck in salt crystals (one even getting up to an insane-sounding 250 million years) have been met with skepticism. But even doubters of those studies say Schubert’s could have more validity, as the Death Valley area wouldn’t have allowed recrystallization (which would permit the liquid to escape and fresh microbes to get in) for 10,000 years at the least.

From New Scientist:

Moreover, Schubert thinks he can explain how his microbes managed to stay alive so long. Every crystal that contained live archaeans also contained dead cells from a salt-lake alga known as Dunaliella, which contain high concentrations of glycerol. The team suggest that the glycerol had seeped out of the cells, and that the archaeans lived off this.

Dunaliella cells are such good fodder that the microbes could live much longer than 30,000 years, says Schubert. He calculates that a single Dunaliella cell contains enough glycerol to meet an archaean’s minimal needs for 12 million years. “We have inclusions with dozens of these algal cells inside and just a couple of archaeans, so they have basically a limitless supply,” he says.

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Image: flickr / Shayan (USA)

What if waiting for treatment in the emergency room was like waiting for your toaster to ding, and you knew exactly how long you were going to wait? Many healthcare providers are hopeful that by banding together to coordinate information about how congested their waiting rooms are they can help people make the best decision about where to seek medical attention, according to the Los Angeles Times:

In part to ease the minds of those seeking emergency care — or at least disclose how bad the wait will be — a growing number of suburban emergency rooms around the country are advertising wait times.

Some post the times on their websites. Others tweet, send text messages or display the times on huge highway billboards. A few are testing a service by a start-up company, InQuickER, that allows patients to register online, pay a small fee and hold their place in line while they wait at home.

But what seems like a good bit of pubic service has some doctors concerned that the posted wait times will be misleading. For example, a patient suffering ominous chest pains might be persuaded to drive to a hospital further away for a shorter wait even though he may have been bumped to the front of a longer line closer to home.

So while it may be useful for someone with a minor condition to seek out a shorter wait time, doctors in the article say that people with serious injuries should get to the closest help possible — and fast.

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The battered moon Rhea. Click for a larger version (~96k) Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This Cassini image highlights just how battered the Saturn moon Rhea really is.  There is more than what I thought.  Clicking the image will bring up a larger version and shows some nice detail.

From the Cassini site:

Craters imprinted upon other craters record the long history of impacts endured by Saturn’s moon Rhea.
This view looks toward the mid-southern latitudes of the Saturn-facing side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North on Rhea is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 13, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 262 meters (860 feet) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Damien Bouic, who graciously allowed me to use his very cool renderings of Earth with rings in my article about, um, the Earth with rings, has translated that post into French. I took French many years ago, and all I can still say is Je suis desole, Madam, mais nous n’avons pas du jambon aujord hui. So I hope he did a good job.

Alons-y!

Art Hobson, an Emeritus physicist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has reviewed our book for the American Physical Society’s educational forum, and it seems he liked it. A quote:

Summarizing its prescription, the book’s final chapter states “We must fundamentally change the way we think and talk about science education,” and this means rethinking the education of scientists as well as the public school and college education of non-scientists. “We don’t simply need a bigger scientific workforce: We need a more cultured one, capable of bridging the divides that have led to science’s declining influence. …We must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America’s citizenry.” I couldn’t agree more.

You can read Hobson’s full review here.

Let the Copenhagen fallout continue.

Friday night, after a two-week diplomacy fest that could be called “difficult” at best, leaders of some of the most powerful countries in the world announced that they reached an 11th hour agreement to conclude the United Nations Copenhagen climate summit. After speaking to the assembly, President Barack Obama spent the day going in and out of meetings with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao. They met later with Mammoghan Singh of India, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and South African President Jacob Zuma, before a White House official leaked that these big players had reached an agreement.

Obama had flown to Denmark for the meeting’s final day, hoping to snatch an agreement from the jaws of growing defeatism among those desiring a climate accord. Obama’s 15-hour, seat-of-the-pants dash through Copenhagen was marked by doggedness, confusion and semi-comedy. Constrained by partisan politics at home, and quarrels between rich and poor nations abroad, he was determined to come home with a victory, no matter how imperfect [AP].

And the result was far from perfect. First, the nations assembled failed to meet a binding agreement, as many feared would happen going into the meeting. In addition, the document that remained at the end was the work of those five nations, which has now ignited a storm of protest around the world. Despite the fact that South Africa’s leader was around for the 11th hour agreement, for instance, its climate representatives are now steaming mad. South Africa’s environment minister Buyelwa Sonjica and her two top climate change negotiators said Tuesday that part of the blame rested with the way the host guided the conference. In their first media briefing since returning from talks in the Danish capital that ended Saturday, the trio described an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion that Denmark was plotting to force its own position on other nations [AP].

Europeans, too, balked at Copenhagen’s conclusion. U.K. Climate Secretary Ed Milliband, in a Guardian editorial, also slammed the process, but pointed the finger at China in particular. We did not get an agreement on 50% reductions in global emissions by 2050 or on 80% reductions by developed countries. Both were vetoed by China, despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries [The Guardian]. European Union representatives reacted negatively to the loose agreement, both for not being part of the talks among the five nations and for the agreement’s failure to set binding goals. The markets reacted too. European and United Nations carbon prices fell the most since February after the Copenhagen climate accord didn’t set targets that would boost demand for permits [Bloomberg].

Copenhagen did result in one actual ruling: One hopeful sign is the accord’s pragmatic agreement to pay countries to prevent deforestation. Reversing one of the Kyoto Protocol’s failures, which perversely rewarded countries for planting trees but not for protecting them, this is precisely the kind of big picture cooperation between developed and developing economies that is needed to make a dent in global emissions [CNN]. The U.S. pledged $100 billion to aid poor nations in reducing emissions, and China promised greater transparency in how it cuts carbon, but neither of those are binding.

The parlor game this week is explaining why the Copenhagen talks went down in flames. Writing for CNN, Lisa Margonelli of the think tank New America Foundation says the meeting’s scope was a disadvantage, not an advantage, as gathering the world together to craft rules that would be agreeable and effective was “scientifically and practically naive.” The BBC blames 24 hour news, EU politics, and even the snowy weather for giving skeptics ammunition. (No, apparently we haven’t gotten past the weather/climate issue. Just ask Homer Simpson.)

The BBC hit it closest with their number one reason, however: “Key governments do not want a global deal.” As long as that’s the case, and major U.N. meeting occur in this format, no climate conference will produce anything but a document so wishy-washy that the effect on global emissions is negligible.

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Image: White House / Pete Souza