Fast news

– Cosmetici: la U.E. ha pubblicato il ban on animal testing;

– Ogm: Mark Lynas si descrive come un rivoluzionario pentito, un eroe e un martire mentre fa di ogni erba un fascio;

– Guerre stellari: la Russia farà causa alla Cina i cui detriti spaziali le hanno distrutto un satellite?

– Energia: la JOGMEC (un po’ l’Eni giapponese) dice di aver estratto gas metano dai clatrati nella Fossa di Nankai

– Circuiti integrati: al Caltech sono capaci di ripararsi da soli, “indistruttibili” sembra un po’ prematuro;

– Microbi nel lago Vostok: sembra prematuro anche l’annuncio della loro scoperta

On 7 March, the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute’s Sergei Bulat, who led the Russian team that drilled through 4 kilometers of ice to the surface of the lake last year, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti that they had found a previously unidentified species of bacteria in lake samples collected during an expedition in January.
That they had found life at all was exciting and a reversal of the team’s earlier stance from a decade ago that Vostok might be barren.
But on 9 March, the head of the genetics laboratory at the St. Petersburg Institute, Vladimir Korolyov, told Interfax that what the team had found was only contamination. “We found certain specimen, although not many, but all of them belonged to contaminants (microorganisms from the bore-hole kerosene, human bodies or the lab),” he said. “There was one strain of bacteria which we did not find in drilling liquid, but the bacteria could in principal use kerosene as an energy source. That is why we can’t say that a previously-unknown bacteria was found.”

Ma Carlo Brabante et al. ne hanno trovati.