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Timmins, Ontario, has a long history as a mining town. Photo: Michael Jacobs

In the small city of Timmins, Ontario, a town nestled half way between Michigan and Hudson Bay, there is a mine. Actually, there are many mines—it’s a mining town. But this story is about just one, a mile and a half deep, where there is water bubbling up from below that has been cut off from the rest of the world for at least a billion years—maybe as much as 2.6 billion years.

The longer end of that timeline, Ivan Semeniuk points out in the Globe and Mail, is about half the age of the Earth. This water hasn’t been in contact with the rest of the planet since before the rise of multicellular life.

But like the water trapped in frozen lakes below Antarctica’s massive ice sheets, researchers suspect there might be life in these flows.

“It’s been called the Galapagos of the subsurface,” says Barbara Sherwood Lollar to New Scientist. The water, “is packed with hydrogen and methane – chemicals that microbes love to eat.”

“What we have here,” says Sherwood Lollar, a microbiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, “is a plate of jelly donuts.” While she has yet to confirm whether the water is inhabited, she says the conditions are perfect for life.

The scientists don’t know whether there is any life in the ancient, isolated water. But they’re working on it. The water is young enough that it would have been locked away after life arose on Earth. But it’s been trapped for so long that any life that does exist would likely be unique—a relic of an ancient world. The CBC:

Some Canadian members of the team are currently testing the water to see if it contains microbial life — if they exist, those microbes may have been isolated from the sun and the Earth’s surface for billions of years and may reveal how microbes evolve in isolation.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Balrog: “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world. Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

First Signs of Life Found in Antarctica’s Subglacial Lakes

Photo: Ron Lute

Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

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An artist’s rendition of Acrotholus audeti. Photo: Julius Csotonyi

What’s 90 pounds, six feet long and has an adorable little bone-cased bump for a head? No, not Cubone. It’s this newly discovered dinosaur, Acrotholus audeti, which was dug up recently in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Like the dinosaur havens of the mountainous west, from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Arizona, Alberta is practically stuffed with dinosaur fossils. But by digging around in the the Milk River Formation in southern Alberta—a region traditionally not known for loads of fossils—researchers found something new: the dome-headed skull of Acrotholus audeti. Dated to 85 million years ago, this is the oldest-known North American member (and maybe the oldest in the world) of the big family of bone-headed dinosaurs.

The little dinosaur was an herbivore and, other than the occasional headbutt, might have been pretty cool to hang around. But more than just being a neat little dinosaur, says Discover, the finding is a hint that little dinosaurs may have been way more common than we think.

Most dinosaur finds are of the bigger brethren: big bones are less likely to get picked over and crushed by scavengers or destroyed by time. But, with their big-boned heads strong enough to survive the trials of millions of years, dinosaurs like Acrotholus audeti are helping paleontologists flesh out the record of little dinosaurs. The new find, says the Canadian Press, “ touched off further investigation that suggested the world’s dinosaur population was more diverse than once believed.”

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A funnel cloud in Texas. Photo: Charleen Mullenweg

For two years the majority of the continental U.S. has been plagued by drought, a confluence of natural cycles that have worked together to drive up temperatures and dry up the land. But for all the damage that has been done by the long-running drought, there’s been an upside as well. The lack of water in the atmosphere has also sent the U.S. toward a record low for tornadoes, says Climate Central‘s Andrew Freedman.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Okla., estimates that, between May 2012 and April 2013, there were just 197 tornadoes ranked EF-1 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale. That beats the previous 12-month low, which was 247 tornadoes from June 1991 and May 1992.

That’s the lowest recorded tornado activity since 1954, when scientists first really started keeping track. The number of deaths connected to tornadoes went down, too:

The U.S. did set a record for the longest streak of days without a tornado-related fatality — at 220 days — between June 24, 2012 and Jan. 26, 2013. And July 2012, which was the hottest month on record in the U.S., saw the fewest tornadoes on record for any July.

But the tornadoes didn’t just up and disappear, says Freedman in an August story. Rather, some of them just moved to Canada.

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Don’t Blame the Awful U.S. Drought on Climate Change
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Photo: Marcos F. Marx

If you’re a kid and an optometrist diagnoses you with a lazy eye, you get to run around with an eye patch and pretend you’re a pirate for a little while. If you’re an adult, you’re faced with a future where your brain decides to ignore your weaker eye, potentially leaving you without three-dimensional vision and a reduced ability to detect motion or contrast. Easily fixed in kids, a lazy eye (amblyopia) is pretty much untreatable in adults.

But a promising new bout of research from McGill University’s Robert Hess and colleagues, says the CBC, found that playing Tetris “significantly improves the vision in the weaker eye of someone with lazy eye.” Just playing the game alone isn’t quite enough. The researchers designed a special set of goggles that split the game in two: one eye watched the blocks fall, the other saw the blocks at the bottom of the game board.

After playing Tetris that way for an hour a day for two weeks, nine adults with lazy eye showed a big improvement in the vision of the weaker eye and in their 3D depth perception.

Just getting people to play Tetris with their weak eye alone didn’t illicit the same improvements. It took both eyes working together to stack the blocks to get the desired effect.

“What we have to do is to get the two eyes working together so one eye doesn’t suppress the other eye,” Hess said. He added that there’s nothing special about the Tetris game, and any other visually intensive game or activity that forces the use of both eyes should also be effective.

The Tetris-based approach could also potentially be used in place of giving kids eye patches. Possibly kids should be given a choice—play a video game or get to look like a pirate. Yarr.

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