Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: futurism – Page 944

Fungal diversity in deep-sea extreme environments

The deep-sea is one of the most mysterious and unexplored extreme environments, holding great potential and interest for science. Despite extensive studies on deep-sea prokaryotes, the diversity of fungi, one of the most ecologically important groups of eukaryotic micro-organisms, remains largely unknown. However, the presence of fungi in these ecosystems is starting to be recognised. Many fungi have been isolated by culture-dependent methods from various deep-sea environments, with the majority showing similarity to terrestrial species. However, culture-independent methods have revealed many novel fungal phylotypes, including novel fungal lineages recently described as Cryptomycota, which are suspected to lack typical fungal chitin-rich cell walls. Although true fungal diversity and its role in deep-sea environments is still unclear, the intention of this review is to assess current knowledge of the diversity of fungi in these ecosystems and to suggest future direction for deep-sea fungal research.

Study sets the first germanium-based constraints on dark matter

Cosmological observations and measurements collected in the past suggest that ordinary matter, which includes stars, galaxies, the human body and countless other objects/living organisms, only makes up 20% of the total mass of the universe. The remaining mass has been theorized to consist of so-called dark matter, a type of matter that does not absorb, reflect or emit light and can thus only be indirectly observed through gravitational effects on its surrounding environment.

While the exact nature of this elusive type of matter is still unknown, in recent decades, physicists have identified many particles that reach beyond the standard model (the theory describing some of the main physical forces in the universe) and that could be good candidates. They then tried to detect these particles using two main types of advanced particle detector: gram-scale semiconducting detectors (usually made of silicon and used to search for low-mass dark matter) and ton-scale gaseous detectors (which have higher energy detection thresholds and are better suited to perform high-mass dark matter searches).

The EDELWEISS Collaboration, a large group of researchers working at Université Lyon 1, Université Paris-Saclay and other institutes in Europe, recently carried out the first search for Sub-MeV dark matter using a germanium(Ge)-based detector. While the team was unable to detect dark matter, they set a number of constraints that could inform future investigations.

/* */