Amplify’d from www.ydr.com

Man, 19, dead after shooting in York

Neighbors gather near the scene of a shooting at the 300 block of East Princess Street in York Wednesday July, 20, 2011 as police, left, cover the victim's body. A 19-year-old male was killed in the shooting, which has been declared a homicide. (DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS -- EILEEN JOYCE)

A police officer carries his gun and covers himself with a shield as he enters a building on the 300 block of East Philadelphia Street in York Wednesday July 20, 2011. Police later arrested a man in the residence who is believed to have been involved in the shooting. (DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS -- EILEEN JOYCE)

A police officer photographs the scene of a shooting at the 300 block of East Princess Street in York Wednesday July, 20, 2011. (DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS -- EILEEN JOYCE)

Update 2:50 p.m.

The coroner has been called to the scene. A body is on the ground, under a tarp. Police and bystanders are on the street.

Reported earlier

York, PA - Police and rescue crews are responding to a shooting in York, reported to 911 this afternoon.

The shooting occurred in the 300 block of East Princess Street. York County 911 was alerted to the shooting by ShotSpotter, as well as calls from nearby residents at about 2:30 p.m.

Minutes later, another rescue unit was sent out for a second victim, according to York County 911.

Check back here later for more details.

Update 3:20 p.m.

Coroner Barry Bloss said it was a 19-year-old male who was shot, and it is a homicide. He does not yet know how many shots. He will release more information and the identity once the family is notified.

Update, 5 p.m.

York City Police Chief Wes Kahley said one man has been arrested in connection to the shooting.

Kahley and many other officers, some with shields and an armored vehicle, are at the scene of the arrest on East Philadelphia Street.

Police surrounded the home in the 300 block of East Philadelphia Street shortly after the shooting took place. A man was later arrested and taken out in handcuffs.

The street is closed from North Pine to North Broad streets as police continue to search the home, Kahley said.

There's no indication another person is involved, but Kahley said officers are taking every precaution as they check the home and make sure no one else is there. Read more at www.ydr.com

 

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Cat Deactivating Paperclip

Amplify’d from introducingthenewgifs.blogspot.com

Cat Deactivating Paperclip

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Free Audiobook: Steps to Christ

Amplify’d from steps-to-christ.org

Want to know Jesus better? Download this free Steps to Christ audiobook to learn how!

In just thirteen short chapters, you’ll discover the steps to finding a forever friendship with Jesus. You’ll read about His love for you, repentance, faith and acceptance, growing like Him, the privilege of prayer, what to do with doubt, and how to spend your days rejoicing in your best Friend, Jesus.

You may share this audio book offline, but you may not alter or sell it. If you wish to share it online, please do so by linking to this site or the iTunes podcast.

This recording was read by Becky Wilson Alignay and produced by John Beckett.

About the Author: Ellen G. White

About the Narrator: Becky Wilson Alignay

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Forward

Chapter 1 - God's Love for Man

Chapter 2 - The Sinner's Need of Christ

Chapter 3 - Repentance

Chapter 4 - Confession

Chapter 5 - Consecration

Chapter 6 - Faith and Acceptance

Chapter 7 - The Test of Discipleship

Chapter 8 - Growing Up Into Christ

Chapter 9 - The Work and the Life

Chapter 10 - A Knowledge of God

Chapter 11 - The Privilege of Prayer

Chapter 12 - What to Do with Doubt

Chapter 13 - Rejoicing in the Lord Read more at steps-to-christ.org

 

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The Prophecy Club: THIS WEEK IN RADIO

THIS WEEK IN RADIO

Prophecy In The Stars w/Bob Wadsworth 1

Stan Johnson - 7/11/2011 - mp3 download

Prophecy In The Stars w/Bob Wadsworth 2

Stan Johnson - 7/12/2011 - mp3 download

Emergency The Gulf Stream Has Stopped - John Moore

Stan Johnson - 7/13/2011 - mp3 download

Proof Of The Mystery Planet - John Moore

Stan Johnson - 7/14/2011 - mp3 download

Underground Government Survival Bases - John Moore

Stan Johnson - 7/15/2011 - mp3 download

The Prophecy Club

Toll Free: 888.799.6111

Email: prophecyman@cjnetworks.com Website: www.prophecyclub.com

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Woman Accused of Groping TSA Agent Hailed as Hero

Video: http://denver.cbslocal.com/top-video?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=6061127

<script src="http://video.denver.cbslocal.com/global/video/videoplayer.js?rnd=306960;hostDomain=video.denver.cbslocal.com;playerWidth=420;playerHeight=278;isShowIcon=true;clipId=6061127;flvUri=;partnerclipid=;adTag=News;advertisingZone=CBS.DENVER%252Fworldnowplayer;enableAds=true;landingPage=;islandingPageoverride=false;playerType=STANDARD_EMBEDDEDscript;controlsType=fixed" type="text/javascript"></script>



LONGMONT, Colo. (CBS4) – The Department of Homeland Security is taking the case of a Longmont woman who allegedly grabbing the breast of a TSA agent very seriously.



Yukari Mihamae, 61, was taken into custody at the screening area of the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport last Thursday. Police say she refused to go through screening and was argumentative.



Officials say she admitted to grabbing a TSA agent’s breast with both hands and squeezing and twisting, but has not given a reason why.



Mihamae, who had to spend a night in jail, is now charged with felony sexual abuse.



A CBS4 reporter briefly spoke to Mihamae on Sunday at her Longmont home but she said she had no comment about the case on the advice of her attorney.

Some Facebook users who are obviously frustrated with the strict procedures of the Transportation Safety Administration have set up a Facebook page expressing their support for Mihamae. The “Acquit Yukari Mihamae” page had more than 500 supporters on Monday.



News of its creation the brought some different reactions from travelers on Sunday at Denver International Airport.



“Calling it a felony is pretty silly and the TSA abuses people daily,” Drew Westphal, a resident of New York City, told CBS4.



“We have to play along for our security and the safety of the United States,” one traveler told CBS4.



“I don’t think you should be able to put your hands on anybody, especially somebody who is trying to perform security,” Mike Garcia, of Brighton, said.



Mihamae told the New York Post in a phone interview that she is a frequent air traveler and that she runs into a problem with the TSA on a weekly basis.

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Christian Targeted for Homosexual Indoctrination

Jennifer Keeton was a student at Augusta State University (ASU) in Georgia with an excellent academic record.



So why was she expelled from school?



Because she is a Christian who expressed beliefs that did not line-up with the school's extreme pro-homosexual views.



You may recall last year I sent you an email entitled “Sign the petition for Keeton” urging you to take action on behalf of this victim of the Homosexual Lobby.



At that time, Miss Keeton was pursuing a Master’s degree in elementary school counseling.



But because she expressed her moral view of human sexuality, she was labeled by ASU as "homophobic."



They threatened to expel her unless she submitted to a program of Homosexual Re-Education designed to "remediate" her traditional views.



It seems impossible to believe, but they even ordered her to celebrate the homosexual lifestyle by attending a gay pride parade.



You know the type, where men in women's clothes, some only in bikinis, dance through the streets committing all kinds of obscene acts.



Ultimately, Miss Keeton was expelled from ASU for refusing their brainwashing.



And you took action.



Thousands of Public Advocate supporters responded by signing our petition to the Georgia Governor’s office demanding he defund ASU for violating Miss Keene’s First Amendment rights.



Unfortunetly that Governor has come and gone and nothing was done.



And now, Miss Keeton has been stripped of her freedom of speech and her freedom of religion.



A U.S. District Judge, Randall Hall, just upheld ASU’s decision ruling that colleges are allowed to dictate the personal beliefs of its students in order to uphold the college’s curriculum.



After more than eleven months, Miss Keeton is still waiting for her court appeal to be heard, but the Homosexual Lobby is working to keep it from ever seeing the light of day.



That’s why I’m asking you to send a message to the new Georgia governor Nathan Deal demanding he intervene to expedite Miss Keene’s court appeal.



You see, this fight is far from over.



In fact, things have gotten worse.



Because the fight is not just in Georgia -- it’s all across America.



In California, Tennessee, Mississippi and Michigan the Homosexual Lobby is using the same tactics to silence students from speaking the truth about sexuality.



This fight is not just about one student, it’s about countless students across the country who are also being silenced for their moral views.



Of course, the pro-homosexual media is ignoring this story, or even worse reporting that no one cares about it -- but I do, and I know you do too.



I am truly indebted to your steadfast support.



For the Family,



Eugene Delgaudio

President, Public Advocate of the United States

P.S. Please click here to send a message to Georgia Governor Deal demanding he intervene to expedite Miss Keene’s court appeal. No student should be forced to undergo Homosexual Indoctrination.

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In The Image Of God

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Amplify’d from beforeitsnews.com

Secret Weapons Now Beaming Into Your Skull

by Zen Gardner

You'll find it hard to believe how many types of technology are being used on human minds today.

We all know we're "steered" and "walled off" to some degree by influences around us, not the least of which is the media and the onslaught of its corporofascist disinformation and advertising arm.

Deeper influences include so-called modern education and it's engineered dumbing-down of society for decades. Just look around you for how "well repeated" everything we're told has become, with the predominance of shallow Hollywood types and the gutless sing-song intonations and political correctness in society's language.

But there's a lot more you need to know about electronic mind control and what it's doing to you and our world.

1. The Sounds of Silence

Here's one--subliminal programming carried by UHF or Ultra High Frequency signals. Some say this is the reason the government so enthusiastically pushed everyone to digital broadcasting, to implement this, and free-up the analog bandwidth for even more insidious purposes...the chip.

The Department of Defense calls it Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS), and it also goes by the name of S-quad or Squad. In the private sector, the technology goes by the name of Silent Subliminal Presentation System and the technology has also been released to certain corporate vendors who have attached catchy brand names like BrainSpeak Silent Subliminals to their own SSSS-based products.

Whatever you call it, SSSS is a technology that uses subliminal programming that is carried over Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) broadcast waves, planting inaudible messages directly into the subconscious human mind.

Perfected more than twenty years ago by the Department of Defense and battlefield-tested upon unwitting Iraqi soldiers serving in the army of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War during 1991, SSSS is a sinister weapon that may have been been developed for a specific mission: the total subjugation of the American people.

We're talking nasty here. Would these controllers do such a thing? Are you kidding? Any tool that works is a good tool for these tools. Nature will find a way around it, but it's something to behold how desperate these control freaks are.

Whether SSSS is coupled with the new all-digital TV signal as its means of delivery into the minds of an unsuspecting U.S. populace or not, it can be deployed by many different devices, including HAARP and GWEN towers, which would effectively blanket the entire nation at once. In fact, Judy Wall says that “there is evidence that the US Government has plans to extend the range of this technology to envelop all peoples, all countries. This can be accomplished, is being accomplished, by utilising the nearly completed HAARP project for overseas areas and the GWEN network now in place in the US. The US Government denies all this.”

But the most insidious aspect of SSSS is that it is completely undetectable by those being targeted. Because it delivers its subliminal programming directly to the human brain via the auditory sense at frequencies that humans are incapable of perceiving as sound, there is no defense against it. Everyone on the planet is equally susceptible to mind control via SSSS and there isn’t any escape from it, as the UHF waves can be transmitted over very long distances from remotely located sources and will pass through walls and other objects as if they are not there. UHF is the frequency (100mhz) that has been used for television and radio broadcasting for as long as these media have existed. SSSS is designed to utilize UHF as a carrier wave.

Even more insidious, though, is the fact that, coupled with the use of supercomputers, an individual’s unique electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns can be digitally altered and then stored for rebroadcast via digital UHF. According to Judy Wall, editor and publisher of Resonance, the newsletter of the Bioelectromagnetics Special Interest Group, these computer-enhanced EEGs “can identify and isolate the brain’s low-amplitude ‘emotion signature clusters,’ synthesize them and store them on another computer. In other words, by studying the subtle characteristic brainwave patterns that occur when a subject experiences a particular emotion, scientists have been able to identify the concomitant brainwave pattern and can now duplicate it.” These modified emotion signature clusters can then be broadcast over UHF carrier frequencies (i.e., regular TV and radio signals) directly into the brain where they can then “silently trigger the same basic emotion in another human being.” In other words, if the emotional signature cluster for, say, a feeling of hopelessness and despair is being fed directly into your brain via unseen radio waves, you will feel those emotions. The implications of this are, quite literally, mind boggling. Source

2. Another Microwave Scream Inside the Skull

The U.S. military bankrolled early development of a non-lethal microwave weapon that creates sound inside your head. But in the end, the gadget may be just as likely to wind up in shopping malls as on battlefields, as I report in New Scientist.

The project is known as MEDUSA – a contrived acronym for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio. And it should not be confused with the Long Range Acoustic Device and similar gadgets which simply project sound. This one uses the so-called "microwave auditory effect": a beam of microwaves is turned into sound by the interaction with your head. Nobody else can hear it unless they are in the beam as well.

The effect has long been a laboratory curiosity, with no application. But, over the years, the military has been intrigued. The idea (dubbed "the telepathic ray gun") was mentioned in a 1998 US Army study, which turned up in a recent Freedom of Information Act document dump. Five years later, the Navy decided to put some R&D dollars into the project. Now, as I note on the New Scientist website, Dr. Lev Sadovnik of the Sierra Nevada Corporation has provided more details.

There are health risks, he notes. But the biggest issue from the microwave weapon is not the radiation. It’s the risk of brain damage from the high-intensity shock-wave created by the microwave pulse. Clearly, much more research is needed on this effect at the sort of power levels that Dr. Sadovnik is proposing. But if it does prove hazardous, that does not mean an end to weapons research in this area: a device that delivered a lethal shock-wave inside the target’s skull might make an effective death ray.

Dr. Sadovnik also makes the intriguing suggestion that, instead of being used at high power to create an intolerable noise, it might be used at low power to produce a whisper that was too quiet to perceive consciously but might be able to subconsciously influence someone. The directional beam could be used for targeted messages, such as in-store promotions. Sadovnik even suggests subliminal advertising, beaming information that is not consciously heard (a notion also spotted on the US Army’s voice-to-skull page). While the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion is dubious, I can see there might be some organizations interested in this capability. And if that doesn’t work, you could always point the thing at birds. They seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, so it might be used to scare flocks away from wind farms — or shoo pigeons from city streets.  Source

3. HAARP and GWEN Tower Manipulation

I watch the weather. Not from conventional sites, but from real reporters who can see what's going on. Dutchsince reports regularly on what the towers are showing him, and has incredible accuracy in telling us what weather system type is tending to come where.

And what apparently is guiding these formations is HAARP type broadcast technology emanating out of military bases and government installations around the country. After all, they've openly stated they want to own the weather by 2025.

What, are we stupid?

GWEN Towers

"Free" WiFi in US. Free, at what cost?

4. EMFs Blasting Everywhere

We're being killed in slow motion. A microwave oven has warnings all over it, and if you use an EMF detector you'll find it gives off a strong blast even when off, especially around the sides. Cell phones are now known to cause cancer and Russia has banned their use amongst youth.

Western world? Fry away. 'We don't care, we dare. Precautions are for pussies. Put that gun to your head ol' boy, you're a tough codger.'

Conclusion

Pretty serious stuff. And some of this is from older reports. There's lots more to all this, I'm only touching on the surface to get people thinking and aware. I'm no expert on any of this by any means, just aware we're being screwed with for ulterior motives...as usual.

The fundamental point is, these towers you're seeing going up around you are not all for cell phones! Some of these are huge metal beams emanating "God" knows what around them. Here's one I just took a picture of in Austin yesterday RIGHT AMONGST ALL THE KIDS in a frequented and densely housed area off Guadelupe St. by U of T.

Tragic.

According to expert Barry Trower, cell towers should not be within a mile and a half of humans - yet they're deliberately placed on medical buildings, within densely populated housing areas, and on schools and recreation areas.

It's a living tragedy in slow motion. And no one notices, because no one in responsible positions are responsible to the people, just money, power, position and corporate greed.

Be aware. Campaign against towers near you and your loved ones. Investigate orgonite and other technologies and disable towers all you can, according to your faith. We will win, but not by sitting idly by.

Don't just sit there and fry.

Love,

Zen

www.zengardner.com Read more at beforeitsnews.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.wired.com

Senators Ask Spy Chief: Are You Tracking Us Through Our iPhones?

By Spencer Ackerman

Two key senators want to know if the leader of the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus believes it’s legal for spooks to track where you go through your iPhone.

In a letter that Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) will send later on Thursday, obtained by Danger Room, the senators ask Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “Do government agencies have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes?”

Both senators are members of the panel overseeing the 16 intelligence agencies. In May, they sounded warnings that the Obama administration was secretly reinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow a broader amount of domestic surveillance than it had publicly disclosed.

“[R]ecent advances in geolocation technology have made it increasingly easy to secretly track the movements and whereabouts of individual Americans on an ongoing, 24/7 basis,” they write. “Law enforcement agencies have relied on a variety of different methods to conduct this sort of electronic surveillance, including the acquisition of cell phone mobility data from communications companies as well as the use of tracking devices covertly installed by the law enforcement agencies themselves.”

Geolocation is a particular interest of Wyden’s. Technically, there are few obstacles to clandestine geodata collection, since most mobile phones feature built-in GPS. So along with a House Republican, Jason Chaffetz, Wyden introduced a bill that would require warrants for law enforcement to collect geodata. As our sister blog Threat Level has reported, a patchwork of inconsistent recent court rulings has yet to resolve whether geolocation data is protected by the Fourth Amendment.

But intelligence collection is a horse of a different color. The 2008 FISA Amendments Act that blessed the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance programs allowed intelligence agencies greater leeway to collect metadata on Americans’ communications abroad. It’s unclear to the senators if that or any other law prompted the spy community to move into geolocation collection.

That’s why Wyden and Udall want “unclassified answers” from Clapper. If Clapper thinks his spies can go after U.S. citizens’ geodata, they want the “specific statutory basis” for that collection, along with a description of any “judicial review or approval by particular officials” that might accompany it. They also want to know if Clapper thinks there’s any affirmative legal “prohibition” to geodata collection by spies, if the spy chief doesn’t think it’s legal.

The senators note that legislative restrictions on GPS acquisition so far only apply to cops and feds, not spies. “Clearly Congress needs to also understand how intelligence authorities are being interpreted as it begins to consider legislation on this issue,” they write.

They also remind Clapper that the FISA Amendments Act is set to expire at the end of the year. The letter asks Clapper to disclose if the surveillance dragnet it authorizes includes the communications of “law-abiding Americans,” the key objection from civil libertarians to the Act, and if any “significant interpretations of the FISA Amendments Act [are] currently classified.”

That’s the “secret law” fear that vexes Udall and Wyden. And if it applies to the Patriot Act and geolocation collection, it might also apply to more traditional avenues of government surveillance.

Photo: Flickr/ForestAndKim

See Also: Bill Would Keep Big Brother’s Mitts Off Your GPS Data There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says Battle Brews Over FBI’s Warrantless GPS Tracking Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back Video: The Dissection of an FBI Bumper-Beeper

Spencer Ackerman is Danger Room's senior reporter, based out of Washington, D.C., covering weapons of doom and the strategies they're used to implement. Follow @attackerman and @dangerroom on Twitter. Read more at www.wired.com

 

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Princeton University geoscientist Tullis Onstott is now making headlines for unearthing "worms from hell."

Amplify’d from www.physorg.com

Onstott's discovery of worms in Earth's depths raises questions about life in space

July 12, 2011 By Nick DiUlio

The species of nematode discovered by Onstott's research team can tolerate very high temperatures, reproduce asexually and feed on bacteria from the subsurface. It's a degree of unprecedented complexity that has prompted Onstott to say that finding these nematodes at such depths was akin to "finding Moby Dick in Lake Ontario." Credit: Gaetan Borgonie

After digging holes in the Earth's crust for nearly two decades, Princeton University geoscientist Tullis Onstott is now making headlines for unearthing "worms from hell."

Onstott's research team, which he led with Gaetan Borgonie of the University of Ghent in Belgium, recently made a startling discovery: microscopic roundworms known as nematodes living nearly two-and-a-half miles beneath the Earth's surface in several South African gold mines. The worms are roughly a quarter of the diameter of the head of a pin. Although nematode species have been known to live as far as 20 feet below the surface, scientists generally assumed there was no reason to believe the organisms would be found anywhere near the depths of those found by Onstott's team, he noted.

The discovery, which was published in the June 2 issue of the journal Nature in an article titled "Nematoda From the Terrestrial Deep Subsurface of South Africa," has attracted the attention of national media outlets such as The Washington Post, National Geographic and Time. Moreover, it has raised questions about not only the possibility of even more complex organisms miles below the Earth's surface, but also the likelihood of life far into space.

"The potential to look for alien life on other planets exists, in a way, right here on Earth," said Onstott, a professor of geosciences who joined the Princeton faculty in 1985. "What we're looking for are 'extremophiles' deep within the Earth, living in an environment that could also occur on other planets."

This particular extremophile -- a word used to describe forms of microbial life found in habitats previously thought uninhabitable -- is remarkable not only for the depth at which it was found, but also for its biological complexity.

A wide range of single-celled organisms previously has been known to thrive as far down as these worms. It was thought, however, that the constraints of temperature, energy, oxygen and space would make it impossible for a multicellular organism to live in such a place. These half-millimeter-long worms can apparently tolerate very high temperatures, prompting the researchers to nickname them "worms from hell." The worms also reproduce asexually and feed on bacteria from the subsurface. Given their size, Onstott said that finding these nematodes at such depths was akin to "finding Moby Dick in Lake Ontario."

Immersed in explorations below the Earth

An explorer at heart, Onstott has been searching for this type of biological revelation ever since he was "bitten badly by the subsurface bug" as an associate professor of geosciences at Princeton in 1994. That year he was first introduced to the strange world of deep, subsurface bacteria, and less than two years later he found himself thoroughly immersed in microbiology, plunging far beneath the Earth's surface on what he likes to call "underground safaris."

It's ironic that Onstott developed such passion for the underground world, considering that since he was a boy growing up in New Mexico he only ever wanted to go into space. In high school, shortly after watching Apollo 8 launch from the Kennedy Space Center on television in 1968, Onstott read Carl Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe." The book had a significant impact on him, and he was convinced he'd become an interstellar expert once he graduated.

Enduring 90-plus degree temperatures, Onstott turns a valve while working at a depth of more than three kilometers in a South African gold mine where he found the subterranean roundworms. Credit: Lisa Pratt

While earning his bachelor's degree at the California Institute of Technology in the mid-1970s, however, Onstott's interests veered away from planetary science and toward geophysics. By the time he started working on his Ph.D. at Princeton, which he completed in 1980, Onstott no longer saw space -- or Mars in particular -- as a viable avenue of research.

"I was very much interested in traveling to other countries," Onstott recalled. "I couldn't very well travel to Mars, could I?"

However, what fueled Onstott's passion for the deepest of subsurface extremophiles was, more or less, the same question that fueled his fascination with space: He wanted to know how it's possible for life to exist in conditions so radically different from those on the surface of the Earth.

"Finding any life form in a strange place where normal people don't go and you would never expect to find it? That's always going to be something that appeals to the imagination," Onstott said. "It's almost science fiction in that regard. The search for life in these strange environments itself is something that broadens human perspective on life, and that's very important in helping us better understand how life evolves and how bizarre life can be."

Digging for further answers

The last 15 years of Onstott's subterranean explorations, research and study have taken him to myriad locales across the globe. Not only does he frequent the gold mines of South Africa -- where temperatures often approach 95 very humid degrees -- he has also taken several trips to the gold mines of Canada, where the warm air from the Earth's depths collides so quickly with sub-freezing surface temperatures that "snowflakes the size of chandeliers" form inside the mine, he said.

This, too, made Onstott think of Mars, where the conditions match those of the Canadian mines quite remarkably in certain spots.

"Everything is frozen on the Martian surface, but you go down a half-kilometer or so and things get warmer," said Onstott. "Also, you have caves on Mars where water might have risen through evaporation and frozen and crystalized. That's where you want to go looking for life on Mars."

Even though he still remains interested in space, Onstott is particularly excited to see how the discovery of these "worms from hell" further informs scientists' understanding of this planet. For instance, Onstott wants to figure out what relationship these South African nematodes -- dubbed Halicephalobus mephisto in honor of the sinister, darkness-loving demon Mephistopheles of literary lore -- may have with subsurface radiation as a means of energy.

Onstott would also like to complete the gene sequence for H. mephisto and compare it to the genomes of closely related species found near the surface of the mines. This should give him a better sense of whether or not the nematode has adapted or evolved in the subsurface, and help him answer the pressing question of whether or not life can originate so far down, he said.

Questions like these are what compel Onstott to go even deeper, continually plunging himself ever further into the shrouded mysteries of the Earth's black, sweltering, sunless interior.

"We still don't know how far down the biosphere goes," Onstott said. "We have an expectation that it stops at a certain temperature, but we haven't found that particular boundary yet. And if we do, the next question becomes: What lies beyond that?"

Provided by Princeton University (news : web) Read more at www.physorg.com

 

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