May I be the first...
to welcome our purplish-brown, blobby overlords.
'Alien' lifeform wakened from 120,000 year Arctic slumber
American scientists, showing the reckless disregard for the warnings implicit in quality science fiction that is so regrettably common in the boffinry community, have revived an ancient lifeform which has been slumbering beneath the Arctic ice pack for 120,000 years. To add insult to injury, the scientists believe that their …
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Monday 15th June 2009 11:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Who do these scientists think they are...
....meddling with forces they cannot possibly comprehend? I demand some kind of oversight.Perhaps the religious community could be of some help here? After all, they are moral people with a grasp on science. I suggest some of those creationist types, with their knowledge of the earths origins, their assistance would be very welcome by the scientists im sure.
Just dont let them create blobby super-dinosaurs and put them in a fucking theme park or something. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO JEFF GOLDBLUM AND HIS FUCKING CHAOS THEORIES!
AC...I dont want their blobby assassins coming to exterminate me with..err..goo or whatever.
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Monday 15th June 2009 11:30 GMT Charles King
To do this properly...
they should have revived it in a lab appropriately placed somewhere on the ice cap, then sent back a message saying, "...another lab tech has come down with this mysterious illness, and Dr Jones is complaining of headaches and acting strangely..." before cutting off all radio contact.
Of course, there is the chance that plans to surprise the troops when they arrive and have a good laugh might go horribly wrong...
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Monday 15th June 2009 11:30 GMT Tony S
@jai
"....nuke the site from orbit!
Ah, but if you refer to the film "Evolution", you'll know that this is how they propagate - the more heat, the bigger, the more purplish brown and the blobbier they get.
But the good thing is that we just need to get in a few crates of Head & Shoulders... (although to be a nit picker, the chemistry behind the explanation in the film was a tad inconsistent.)
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Monday 15th June 2009 11:45 GMT deshepherd
@Paging John Carpenter....
No need to do this ... in "the blob" (at least 1958 original) a large blobby organism terrorises a small town before its discovered that the only way to control it is to freeze it which they do with C02 fire extinguishers before the USAF safely dispose of it in, ahem, the Arctic.
Thus I suspect that this blobby lifeform revived from its frozen state in the arctic may well be much less than 100,000 years old :-)
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Monday 15th June 2009 11:45 GMT keith9600
retired engineer
This article had stated:
"In summary, then, we're looking at an ancient lifeform - albeit tiny - recently wakened by meddling scientists from its hundred-thousand-year sleep beneath the polar icecap."
Here factual reporting stops and unfounded assumption takes over:
"It's capable of surviving, perhaps, in the most hostile alien interplanetary environments known to man."
This is unproven ~ a conclusion not warranted by anything the laboratory has done to date. According to your own report, all it's survived is a very cold environment. Please don't extrapolate by inserting your own wild imaginings.
"It can evade mankind's toughest lab sterilisation precautions."
That is simply not known. Considering what the report says, all it has survived to date is a very long stay in a very cold environment. Claiming it can survive "...mankind's toughest lab sterilisation precautions" is alarmist and far from any demonstrated truth.
I'd appreciate fewer reporters' unfounded opinions and more facts in scientific reports. Perhaps you need a few more "perhaps" qualifiiers.
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Monday 15th June 2009 13:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Unoriginal?
Unoriginal, maybe. But the "may I be the first to welcome..." posts are a nice tradition on the Register, a catch phrase if you like. It's something that everyone understands.
As for RetiredEngineer, I believe most of us have been reading the Reg. long enough and have sufficient intellect and command of English to understand changes in context and the house style.
If I want news, outspoken comment and amusement (and the moderatrix) I check the Reg. out at lunchtime. If I want rigorously checked scientific technical papers then there are plenty of really boring publications you can turn to. "Camshaft Spotters Monthly" perhaps?
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Monday 15th June 2009 13:15 GMT Rod MacLean
RE: Oh good God no
Alex Cooper wrote: "It's not Mr Blobby is it?? Thought we got rid of that thing ages ago, it's too horrible to even contemplate!"
I think it's a fertile spore from the main blobby conglomerate.
What we have to worry about next will be the thousands of mini-blobbies breaking away from their lives of petri-dish drudgery and restarting the plan to take over Saturday night television...
I'd actually pay to watch Davina and Ant and Dec being beaten to a pulpy mess by a thousand Mr Blobbys.
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Monday 15th June 2009 13:15 GMT Simon Barrett
Can I just point out...
That any scientist called Dr. Jenny Loveland-Curtz, while likely to be beautiful and brilliant, will not be able to defeat the earth-threatening blob on her own but will need some kind of low-brow, no-respect-for-authority loose cannon to get the job done.
On the upside, she'll probably survive and will get a new boyfriend out of it.
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Monday 15th June 2009 13:15 GMT Simon Ball
@AC
"Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" was from Aliens (they declined to name it Alien 2).
An extraterrestrial pathogen which had its growth radically accelerated by heat was from Evolution.
The link between nukes and extraterrestrial pathogens was The Andromeda Strain, werein the laboratory where the pathogen was studied was equipped with a thermonuclear failsafe, to sterilise the faciltity (and most of the surrounding area) in the event of a containment breach.
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Monday 15th June 2009 13:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
not quite.
"It can evade mankind's toughest lab sterilisation precautions."
It can apparently pass through bog-standard sterilisation filters. I doubt that it survives autoclaving, which is the standard labware sterilisation procedure. Nuking the site from orbit is probably unnecessary.
And what Huw 3 said about E.coli.
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Monday 15th June 2009 13:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
I can't believe my alma mater is going to be responsible for the destruction of the world!
Oh the humanity!
Well, actually having dealt with all to many of the gits there, actually I can. But it's still embarrassing.
One other small request: the acceptable alternate monikers are Penn State or PSU. Penn Uni comes a bit to close to The University of Pennsylvania. They would be the high falutin' Ivy Leagures, and it is quite insulting to be associated with them.
Where's the head in a bag icon? I am so ashamed.
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Monday 15th June 2009 14:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
bags of mostly water
"May I be the first...
By Andrew Johnson 3 Posted Monday 15th June 2009 09:57 GMT
to welcome our purplish-brown, blobby overlords.
"
of course you "bags of mostly water" forget the purplish-brown, blobby overlords were here long before you were, so its for them to welcome us after they fully awake and start useing our bags of warm water and salts as their breeding grounds anew....
did you people not see the premise of the very first "Regenesis" before they lost the plot and moved into mundain story telling.....
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Monday 15th June 2009 15:06 GMT peter 3
Mistakes are part of learning
Have they tried feeding it chocolate or shining a laser onto it maybe
bathing it in radiation or playing popular 80's hits on oversized loud speakers.
If they don't have a microwave right next to the petri dish or leaking containers of
DNA lying around then nothing will happen!
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Monday 15th June 2009 15:06 GMT TeeCee
Meh!
120,000 years? So in length of time life's been around terms it's been taking a bit of a siesta then. About the only danger here is that of it getting a tad pissed off at being woken up early and throwing a hissy fit.
Put it this way. If it was deadly to human life, there wouldn't be any human life around these days for it to be deadly to.
Now, where's my cloned T-Rex you bastards?
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Monday 15th June 2009 19:34 GMT Bartelby-wasPiLS
Tiny but deadly...
If I remember well, The Thing (the Carpenter's one at least) is also tiny, tiny, tiny... roughly the size of a mammalian cell, which admittedly makes it a couple hundred times larger than /this/ particular alien, but it might have been a monitor resolution problem... after all, if we switch from Blair's console to HDTV, we might notice that the entities he was "observing" are actually aggregates of hundreds of these tiny purple-ish things...
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Monday 15th June 2009 19:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
respect to blobby things
let us not forget that the last famous blobby thing, blue-green algea to be precise, invented SEX.
I look forward to whatever new delights the now empurpled revisitor has to offer.
Lovely article, steeped in the revered house style.
@ Mr Retireded_Engineer, yes these people are making things up and drawing false inferences, deliberately.
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Monday 15th June 2009 19:38 GMT J 3
Ancient?
I still have to read the original research, but going by the Reg article only this "ancient" qualifier is a bit weird here... 120,000 years is nothing in bacterial terms, so while it would be really cool (ahem), it is really mostly a modern organism. Now, a 3 billion year old bacterium brought back to life, not THAT would be something crazy and alien.
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Tuesday 16th June 2009 09:30 GMT Mark York 3
I seem to remember....
" ...that's how the Cybermen got revived back in Troughton days."
The Cybermen deliberately froze themselves & awoken by explorers on Telos, your thinking of the Ice Warriors (Martians), I'm also thinking Fourth Doctor's Krynoids.
Paris because she's thawed out a few things.
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Tuesday 16th June 2009 09:30 GMT Kristin McKechie
Typical..
...nurse Lovelace gets sued for bringing a purplish, blobby entity to life (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/15/nurse_lovelace/) while Doctor Loveland-Curtze will probably get a Nobel prize...
Just goes to show that the Doctors take all the credit while the Nurses do all the real work..
*disclaimer: I'm married to a nurse*
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Tuesday 16th June 2009 09:30 GMT amanfromMars 1
Who Plans against Us/for Us? ......Real Aliens or Virtual Idiots
""Please don't extrapolate by inserting your own wild imaginings."
You're new here, aren't you?" .... By Sean Timarco Baggaley Posted Monday 15th June 2009 12:35 GMT
:-) Classic, Sean. It just goes to show that not everyone realises that Life is an extrapolation of wild imaginings. And whose wild imaginings are you following today? Who rules your life?
Lewis,
When are you going to expose these sad and mad jokers ..... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/15/cabinet_office_cybersec_agency/ ...... as nothing other than gravy trainers who would have no idea of the skillsets required to Run and Foster CyberIntelAIgent Security Missions.
Seems like this earlier question to you has been answered with a very clear ...... we haven't a fcuking clue about what we should be doing.
"Lewis,
You are supposed to have your ear to the ground in military circles, so who has Lead Responsibility, in UK Special Forces, for CyberSpace Command and Control Configuration.
Or is that something to be supplied to the MOD from a Private Contractor and/or Mercenary Pirate ……….. to Gift them a Remote Civil Power which extraordinarily renders Media and Government, their Puppets. And in that case, who would be the Decisive Procurement Officer/Head Honcho/Chief Hoover?" ..... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/03/royal_navy_vs_ufos/comments/
Seems like a good time to Offer them some valuable instruction although that is maybe always best provided in CyberSpace Field as a Virile and Viral Red Team Magic Hat Penetrations BetaTest/Live AIdDestruction Testing to Expose the Systemic Vulnerabilities in Establishment Systems ....... because that are too slow and stupid and outdated/cumbersome and pathetically unwieldy, to quickly understand anything else ....... and they have no one at point, easily contacted and knowledgeable, to take and deflect Live Fire.
The old way of playing the Great Game whereby you just simply ignored the Public and did your own thing behind closed doors and expected the News/Media to carry and promote dodgy plans, just because you were screwing the System and Laundering Public Money, a la G20 Summit and Cabinet Style, is long gone. The Puppet Show is Over ...... and there is a New Game in Town ...... which is shared here to discover the Present State of British Intelligence and Counter CyberIntelAIgents across Any and All Departments which one would reasonably expected to be at ITs Leading Cutting Edge. The Evidence would seem to suggest a Pitifully Poor at best, and at worst, a non existent Facility, for which they should hang their heads in Shame for are they not to Blame? Although they could always argue to Escape Accountability and Responsibility, as Sad and Sorry Wasters always do, that as Minnows they would and will never be able to do SharksWorks, and who could disagree with that.
This is where IT is at ....in the CyberSpace Security Game? .....
"Alex,
One could easily Create with AI, a Civil CyberSpace Project for Computer Program Led Beings and CyberIntelAIgently Designed Entities, which would XXXXorcise and Exercise the Global Intelligence Agencies and Tempt them into the Realities of Virtual Reality XXXXistentialism.
AI Facilition for Global Operating Devices ...... with QuITe GOD-like Control of Power and therefore in Direct Control of ITs Distribution.
Which would take AIMMORPGPlay right to the Hearts and Minds of the Legacy Incumbent Establishment and would Invite them to Invest Quantitatively Eased Funds with Driving Sourcerors.
Thus will they be rightly entitled to be appraised of what Fate has in Store when Destiny Plays the Always Winning Hand. Which as a Right Royal Flush is Incredibly Hard to Beat without Cheating, and then is All Lost and Everything Subject to Forfeit/Credit Transfer/Worthy Ruin.
Those Stakes though should not So Paralyze them with their Own Fears that they would not wish to Play in the Virtual Realms of CyberSpace, for One cannot avoid the Reality of that which is Virtually Presented as being Already Technically There ....... and XXXXStreamly HyperRadioProActive
Which would Enter Hide&Seekers into EnigmatIQ Vorsprung durch AITechnik MasterClasses in NEUKlearer Energy and Virtual Astra Meta PhysICQs.
http://sandpit.hideandseekfest.co.uk/2009/01/14/state-of-the-sandpit/ " ....... which would have been also a valid message for Alex Allen's inbox too but it aint working/receiving mail anymore, which always tells one exactly what one needs to know about the competition and opposition ....... and tells everyone else that it may not even exist, which adds further vulnerability pressures to a Struggling Administration Modelled on Evaporating Spin.
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Thursday 18th June 2009 23:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
These people
Regarding this article's closing statement, I must say that the finding may on the contrary be a warning, that Mars may not be death afterall, but that if there is life, it may post a serious biological threat to humanity, as this awaken lifeform does.
On the same token, it is also a warning of how the melting of polar ice can also release this kind of organisms apart from our natural environments for hundreds of thousands of years, to be suddenly in contact with our ocean's foodchains reaching up to humans. This one was found and is kept under control laboratory conditions, but the melting scenario is a uncontroled condition of potential biohazard then. One of the theories regarding the disapearance of dinasours has to do with a widely spread disease. There is much ti study and be careful about this finding/warning.
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