Script:
You will hear a speaker giving a talk about some reason research about a new unusual life form.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the sixth of our Ecology evening classes. Nice to see you all again. As you know from the programme, today I want to talk to you about some research that is pushing back the frontiers of the whole field of ecology. And this research is being carried out in the remoter regions of our planet ... places where the environment is harsh and until recently it was thought that the conditions couldn't sustain life of any kind. But, life forms are being found and these have been grouped into what ¡s now known as extremophiles - that is, organisms that can survive in the most extreme environments. And these discoveries may be setting a huge challenge for the scientists of the future, as you'll see in a minute.
Now, the particular research I want to tell you about was carried out in Antarctica one of the coldest and driest places on Earth. But a multinational team of researchers - from the US, Canada and New Zealand - recently discovered colonies of microbes in the soil there, where no one thought it was possible. Interestingly enough, some of the colonies were identified as a type of fungus called Beauveria Bassiana - a fungus that lives on insects. But where are the insects in these utterly empty regions of Antarctica? The researchers concluded that this was clear evidence that these colonies were certainly not new arrivals… they might've been there for centuries, or even millennia possibly even since the last Ice Age! Can you imagine their excitement?
Now, some types of microbes had previously been found living just a few millimetres under the surface of rocks porous, Antarctic rocks … but this was the first time that living colonies had been found surviving - erm relatively deeply in the soil itself, several centimetres down in fact.
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