Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
CU scientists find life forms in a lifeless land
Jun 14th
A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the Martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi and other rudimentary organisms called archaea, which seem to have a different way of converting energy than their cousins elsewhere in the world.
“We haven’t formally identified or characterized the species,” said Ryan Lynch, a CU-Boulder doctoral student involved in the study. “But these are very different than anything else that has been cultured. Genetically, they’re at least 5 percent different than anything else in the DNA database of 2.5 million sequences.”
Life gets little encouragement on the incredibly dry slopes of the tallest volcanoes in the Atacama region, where CU-Boulder Professor Steve Schmidt and his team collected soil samples. Much of the sparse snow that falls on the terrain sublimates back to the atmosphere soon after it hits the ground, and the soil is so depleted of nutrients that nitrogen levels in the scientists’ samples were below detection limits.
One of the most hostile environments on the planet
Ultraviolet radiation in the high-altitude environment can be twice as intense as in a low-elevation desert, said Schmidt of CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. While the researchers were on site, temperatures dropped to 14 degrees Fahrenheit one night and spiked to 133 F the next day.
How the newfound organisms survive under such circumstances remains a mystery. Although Ryan, Schmidt and their colleagues looked for genes known to be involved in photosynthesis and peered into the cells using fluorescent techniques to look for chlorophyll, they couldn’t find evidence that the microbes were photosynthetic.
Instead, they think the microbes might slowly generate energy by means of chemical reactions that extract energy and carbon from wisps of gases such as carbon monoxide and dimethylsulfide that blow into the desolate mountain area. The process wouldn’t give the bugs a high-energy yield, Lynch said, but it could be enough as it adds up over time. A paper on the findings has been accepted by the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, published by the American Geophysical Union.
While normal soil has thousands of microbial species in just a gram of soil, and garden soils even more, remarkably few species have made their home in the barren Atacama mountain soil, the new research suggests. “To find a community dominated by less than 20 species is pretty amazing for a soil microbiologist,” Schmidt said.
Nearly 20,000 feet in altitude, snowless for 48,000 years
He has studied sites in the Peruvian Andes where, four years after a glacier retreats, there are thriving, diverse microbe communities. But on these volcanoes on the Chile-Argentina border, which rise to altitudes of more than 19,685 feet and which have been ice-free for 48,000 years, the bacterial and fungal ecosystems have not undergone succession to more diverse communities. “It’s mostly due to the lack of water, we think,” he said. “Without water, you’re not going to develop a complex community.”
“Overall, there was a good bit lower diversity in the Atacama samples than you would find in most soils, including other mountainous mineral soils,” Lynch said. That makes the Atacama microbes very unusual, he added. They probably had to adapt to the extremely harsh environment, or may have evolved in different directions than similar organisms elsewhere due to long-term geographic isolation.
Growth on the mountain might be intermittent, Schmidt suggested, especially if soils only have water for a short time after snowfall. In those situations, there could be microbes that grow when it snows, then fall dormant, perhaps for years, before they grow again. High-elevation sites are great places to study simple microbial communities, ecosystems that haven’t evolved past the very basics of a few bacteria and fungi, Schmidt said.
“There are a lot of areas in the world that haven’t been studied from a microbial perspective, and this is one of the main ones,” he said. “We’re interested in discovering new forms of life, and describing what those organisms are doing, how they make a living.”
Schmidt’s lab, along with others, is studying how microorganisms travel from one site to another. One common method of microbe transport is through the air — they’re caught up in winds, sucked up into clouds, form rain droplets and then fall back to the ground somewhere else as precipitation.
But on mountains like Volcán Llullaillaco and Volcán Socompa, the high UV radiation and extreme temperatures make the landscape inhospitable to outside microbes. “This environment is so restrictive, most of those things that are raining down are killed immediately,” Schmidt said. “There’s a huge environmental filter here that’s keeping most of these things from growing.”
The next steps for the researchers are laboratory experiments using an incubator that can mimic the extreme temperature fluctuations to better understand how any organism can live in such an unfriendly environment. Studying the microbes and finding out how they can live at such an extreme can help set boundaries for life on Earth, Schmidt said, and tells scientists what life can stand. There’s a possibility that some of the extremophiles might utilize completely new forms of metabolism, converting energy in a novel way.
Schmidt also is working with astrobiologists to model what past conditions were like on Mars. With their rocky terrain, thin atmosphere and high radiation, the Atacama volcanoes are some of the most similar places on Earth to the Red Planet.
“If we know, on Earth, what the outer limits for life were, and they know what the paleoclimates on Mars were like, we may have a better idea of what could have lived there,” he said.
Other paper authors included Andrew King of Ecosystem Sciences, CSIRO Black Mountain in Acton, Australia; Mariá Farías of Laboratorio de Investigaciones Microbiologicas de Lagunas Andinas, Planto Piloto de Procesos Industriales Microbiologicas, CCT, CONICET in Tucuman, Argentina; Preston Sowell of Geomega, an environmental consulting firm in Boulder; and Christian Vitry of Museo de Arqueologia de Alta Montana in Salta, Argentina.
Coming to CU: High-tech hallucinogenic "Swarm Wall"
Jun 4th
A monthlong summer exhibit at the University of Colorado Boulder Art Museum will feature a dynamic new media composition based on innovative robotics technology.
Called “Swarm Wall,” the large-scale interactive piece displays changing fields of color, light and sound that are driven by a distributed form of artificial intelligence.
As many as 70 intelligent “nodes” behind the piece create a swarming effect when they detect movement and communicate it with one another. The nodes exhibit swarm behavior because each performs actions solely based on its own plan and the actions of its immediate neighbors.
The 42-by-12-foot installation is the first product from a new art and technology research group on campus. The group was launched by faculty members Michael Theodore of the College of Music, who received a $44,000 grant from CU’s Innovative Seed Grant Program last year to support the collaboration, and Nikolaus Correll of the computer science department.
Also involved in the Swarm Wall is Ken Sugawara, a visiting computer science professor from Tohuku Gakuin University in Japan who is an expert in animal flocking behavior, the inspiration behind the patterns the wall displays.
The seed grant, which Correll and Theodore say already has helped them attract additional funding, was the first step toward establishing an active lab where students, faculty and professional researchers from various disciplines collaborate on cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence.
“We’re now calling it the ‘if’ lab because we want to see what happens if artists put engineers in front of tough problems,” said Correll, who is providing space for the growing group within his own robotics laboratory in the Engineering Center at CU-Boulder.
“We want to assemble some basic, inexpensive tools that students can use to explore and to develop new applications of robotics,” Correll said.
Scattered around the lab last week were a collection of small custom circuit boards, electronic panels, items resembling ping pong balls and various other components that are being used to assemble robotic devices.
An assembly of circuit boards connected with bright orange cables also was mounted on a partition in the lab in preparation for the installation of Swarm Wall. Small mechanical arms or flippers waved back and forth as the “brains” behind the Swarm Wall were tested. Sometimes the movement was synchronized, while other times a ripple effect would occur in response to some stimuli.
“Artistic exploration can help computer scientists and engineers to ask questions they wouldn’t have otherwise asked,” said Theodore, who also serves as director of the ATLAS Center for Media, Arts and Performance.
“The difference between arts and science is very diffuse; both want to discover new things,” Theodore said. “The cool thing about art is that we can explore systems that are not of interest to classical funding agencies, but might be so after maturing in a lab like the ‘if’ lab.”
Swarm Wall is one of four pieces in “Michael Theodore: Field Theory,” an exhibition of kinetic sculpture, sound, lighting and works on paper, running June 15 through July 14 at the CU Art Museum. The exhibition is free and open to the public. An opening reception will be held on June 15, from 6 to 8 p.m. For additional information, visitors may call the CU Art Museum at 303-492-8300 or go to http://cuartmuseum.colorado.edu.
CU researchers plotting the "Map of Life
May 22nd
A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its “Map of Life,” an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planet’s diverse flora and fauna.
“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”
The initial version of the map tool being released today is intended to introduce it to the broader public, according to the researchers. It allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species — at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species’ presence has been documented. One function allows users to click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.

The bryozoa fish are found in the Connecticut River
“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”
A paper by Jetz, Guralnick and Jana McPherson of the Calgary Zoological Society describing the evolving Map of Life technology tool appeared in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps and also offer a tool for detecting change over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.
The team is using information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists.” The project’s success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs, and subsequent versions of the mapping tool will offer mechanisms for users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.

Snow Leopards of Tibet are nearly extinct
Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.
“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.
The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters are the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.
The public demonstration version of Map of Life can be found at http://www.mappinglife.org/ and more information about the project is available at http://www.mappinglife.org/about.