BREAKING THE ICE: Somehow, underneath 600 feet of glacier ice and 12 miles away from the nearest open sea, complex life is apparently thriving deep within Antarctica, NASA scientists have discovered. Expecting to find little more than a few microbes, the researchers drilled an 8-inch-wide hole in the West Antarctic ice sheet (pictured) and lowered a video camera down into the pitch-black depths, where sunlight can't reach. To their surprise, a shrimp-like creature came swimming up and perched on the camera's cable, and they later pulled up a tentacle they say came from a foot-long jellyfish. "We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there," a NASA ice scientist tells the AP. "It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate." While the animal is technically just a distant relative of shrimp, it still begs the question of how such a complex animal could live in subfreezing, dark water below 600 feet of ice. And, since it was spotted in such a small amount of water, it also has scientists wondering what else they might find. "They are looking at the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool that you would expect nothing to be living in, and they found not one animal but two," says biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who joined the NASA team later. "We have no idea what's going on down there." (Source: Associated Press, Reuters)

 

TO CATCH A PREDATOR: Tigers and sharks are in danger of extinction, conservationists warned Monday in Doha, Qatar, where world leaders from 175 countries are meeting for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species summit. The conference has been dominated so far by debates over bluefin tuna and elephant ivory, but two of the planet's most iconic predators are in similarly dire straits, largely because of ravenous demand in Asia for products made from their bodies. Up to 73 million sharks are killed around the world each year, mostly to supply fins for shark-fin soup in China, the conservation group Oceana said in a report to U.N. diplomats on Tuesday, pointing out that some populations have fallen by as much as 83 percent. Meanwhile, the market for tigers' pelts and crushed bones is driving a similar problem for the striped big cats, whose populations have plunged nearly 97 percent in the last century, down to about 3,200 now remaining in the wild. "Although the tiger has been prized throughout history, and is a symbol of incredible importance in many cultures and religions, it is now literally on the verge of extinction," CITES Secretary-General Willem Wijnstekers tells the AP. (Sources: AP, BBC News)

 

LONE WOLVERINE: Michigan was once so flush with wolverines that it earned the nickname "the Wolverine State," even adopting the burly weasel relative as its flagship university's mascot. But fur trapping and deforestation wiped out most Michigan wolverines centuries ago, and on Saturday, the last wild wolverine in the Wolverine State was found dead. The 28-pound female was discovered in a creek by hikers in eastern Michigan's Minden City State Game Area, and seemed to have died from natural causes, officials say, although a necropsy will be performed. Since wild wolverines haven't been seen in Michigan for some 200 years, officials believe this one — which was first spotted in 2004 — may have been imported from Canada and released. "She's a pretty unique animal for the state," a Michigan conservation officer tells the Detroit News. "It's pretty sad to see her go." (Source: Detroit News)

 

CAUGHT RED-HANDED: Fingerprints aren't the only traces people leave behind after touching something — they also deposit a trail of personalized germs, specific enough to each person that it could even help police solve crimes, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Human skin teems with bacterial life, and researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder found that these bacteria are not only deposited on computer keyboards after a person types, but that they consistently match that person's bacterial DNA signatures much more closely than those of random people. "Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives," says the study's lead author. "While this project is still in its preliminary stages, we think the technique could eventually become a valuable new item in the toolbox of forensic scientists." A previous study in 2008 catalogued more than 4,700 different bacteria species living on 102 human hands, only five of which were shared among all 51 test subjects. (Sources: Wired, ScienceDaily)

 

OH, THE IRONY: The idea of dumping iron into the oceans has bounced around recently as a way to combat climate change, one of many so-called "geoengineering" schemes designed to treat the symptoms of global warming without necessarily addressing its causes. The idea is that the iron would promote blooms of phytoplankton, which would remove carbon dioxide from the air via photosynthesis, later sequestering it in the sea floor once the plankton dies and sinks. But while many scientists have rejected the proposal simply out of concerns about meddling with the planet's oceans on such a large scale, a new study has found a specific reason it may be a bad idea: Encouraging the growth of certain plankton also increases the production of a dangerous neurotoxin. Domoic acid helps some plankton grow but is toxic to people and many animals, and has been implicated in the deaths of sea lions and pelicans that eat tainted fish and shellfish along coastal waters. But while past studies suggested midocean plankton didn't produce domoic acid, the University of Western Ontario's Charles Trick found they were mistaken. "We found there is a lot of toxin out there," he tells the New York Times. "If we were to seed [the ocean] with iron, the amount of toxin would go up." (Source: New York Times)

 

— Russell McLendon