SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
High Life
from The Scientist (Registration Required)
The windswept peak of Socompa Volcano, on the border of Argentina and Chile, is not a nice place to visit.
Parching winds scour the mountain's gravelly slopes, temperatures can swing from below freezing at night to more than 38 degrees Celsius during the day, and the scarcity of oxygen atop the more than 6,000-meter peak fends off all but the hardiest of mountaineers. You certainly wouldn't want to live there.
That is, unless you happened to be a microbial community inhabiting the thin crust of soil covering loosely-packed gravel, and imbibing your nutriment from gases seeping up from the heart of the dormant lava cone.
Read more ...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.