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EXTREMOPHILES:
Acidophile: An organism with an optimum pH level at or below pH 3.
Alkaliphile: An organism with optimal growth at pH levels of 9 or above.
Endolith: An organism that lives in microscopic spaces within rocks, such as pores between aggregate grains. These may also be called cryptoendoliths. This term also includes organisms populating fissures, aquifers, and faults filled with groundwater in the deep subsurface.
Halophile: An organism requiring at least 2M of salt, NaCl, for growth.
Hyperthermophile: An organism that can thrive at temperatures between 80-121 °C, such as those found in hydrothermal systems.
Hypolith: An organism that lives inside rocks in cold deserts.
Lithoautotroph: An organism (usually bacteria) whose sole source of carbon is carbon dioxide and exergonic inorganic oxidation (chemolithotrophs) such as Nitrosomonas europaea. These organisms are capable of deriving energy from reduced mineral compounds like pyrites, and are active in geochemical cycling and the weathering of parent bedrock to form soil.
Metalotolerant: capable of tolerating high levels of dissolved heavy metals in solution, such as copper, cadmium, arsenic, and zinc. Examples include Ferroplasma sp. and Ralstonia metallidurans.
Oligotroph: An organism capable of growth in nutritionally limited environments.
Osmophile: An organism capable of growth in environments with a high sugar concentration.
Piezophile: An organism that lives optimally at high hydrostatic pressure. Common in the deep terrestrial subsurface, as well as in oceanic trenches.
Polyextremophile: An organism that qualifies as an extremophile under more than one category.
Psychrophile/Cryophile: An organism that grows better at temperatures of 15 °C or lower. Common in cold soils, permafrost, polar ice, cold ocean water, and in/under alpine snowpack.
Radioresistant: resistant to high levels of ionizing radiation, most commonly ultraviolet radiation but also includes organisms capable of resisting nuclear radiation.
Thermophile: An organism that can thrive at temperatures between 60-80 °C.
Xerophile: An organism that can grow in extremely dry, desiccating conditions. This type is exemplified by the soil microbes of the Atacama Desert.
There has been much speculation that any life on Jupiter, or on other gas giants, might be ammonia-based life. The possibility of "abundant biota" in the upper regions of Jupiter's atmosphere was considered in a 1976 paper by Carl Sagan and Edwin E. Salpeter1 prior to the arrival of the first Jupiter probe, Pioneer 10. Sagan and Salpeter compared the ecology of the Jovian atmosphere with that of terrestrial seas which have simple photosynthetic plankton at the top level, fish at lower levels feeding on these creatures, and marine predators which hunt the fish. The three hypothetical Jovian equivalents of these organisms, Sagan and Salpeter termed "sinkers", "floaters", and "hunters". They envisaged creatures like giant gas-bags (see bubble life) that move by pumping out helium and calculated that the "hunter" variety might grow to be many kilometers across (and therefore visible from space).
Jovian aerial life-forms like those described by Sagan and Salpeter are portrayed in Arthur C. Clarke's short story "A Meeting with Medusa" (in The Wind From the Sun). Ben Bova refers in his novel Jupiter to
"[H]uge balloonlike creatures called Clarke's Medusas that drifted in the hurricane-like winds surging across the planet. Birds that have never seen land, living out their entire lives aloft. Gossamer spider-kites that trapped microscopic spores. Particles of long-chain carbon molecules that form in the clouds and sift downward, toward the global ocean below."
Bova speculates further that, in the high-pressure, liquid hydrogen ocean that lies below Jupiter's thick atmosphere, are colossal, city-sized creatures with intelligence. He follows the exploits of one of these sentient giants – Leviathan:
Predators swarmed through Leviathan's ocean: swift voracious Darters that struck at Leviathan's kind and devoured their outer members.
Originally posted by mbkennel
"NASA's explanation? Loose shuttle bolt!! Does that look like a bolt?"
Uh yes. Look in the middle, there is something more hexagonal.
You are seeing the result of motion during the exposure. It happens with film and digital cameras, it's part of the laws of physics.