It’s a mouthful: Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator.
Many people may not know how to pronounce that, let alone what it means.
It’s the name of a life form found deep underground and it was discovered by a team of researchers that included a local scientist.
The bacterium was identified about a decade ago in South Africa, about 2.5 miles underground, said Duane Moser, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, who was in on the find while working for Princeton University.
“It was a big discovery,” he recalled on Friday.
A similar approach used for that discovery could serve as a model to search for evidence of life in extraterrestrial places.
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