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There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts. So imagine you’re hiking through this – – which has been kept ice-less since God was a child because of something called the katabatic winds, which sweep over the valleys at up to 200 mph and suck all the moisture out of them. Anyway, you’re hiking along, passing dessicated penguin carcasses and such, and you come to this. A bleeding glacier. Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. According to Discover Magazine – The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem. Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.

Steven Wright gems 1. Half the people you know are below average. 2. 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name. 3. 42.7% of statistics cited by people in arguments are made up on the spot. 4. A conscience is what feels bad when everything else feels so good. 5. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. 6. The early bird may get the worm, but it’s the second mouse who gets the cheese. 7. What’s the speed of dark? 8. How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink? 9. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm. 10. Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now. 11. Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines. 12. My mechanic told me, “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.” 13. If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried. 14. A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking. 15. The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. 16. The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up. 17. Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don’t have any film.