Wiktionary
n. (context biology English) An organism that lives under extreme conditions of temperature, salinity etc; commercially important as a source of enzymes that operate under similar conditions.
Wikipedia
An extremophile (from Latin meaning "extreme" and Greek meaning "love") is an organism that thrives in physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to most life on Earth. In contrast, organisms that live in more moderate environments may be termed mesophiles or neutrophiles.
Usage examples of "extremophile".
These crystalline low-temperature, quasi-natural, and endlessly self-transformed entities had appeared as an infinitely intricate jeweled garden or huge congeries of minute machinery, a masterpiece of the blind watchmaker operating with nothing more than a faint wash of solar and stellar energy differentials and the self-organizing properties of extremophile nanobacteria.
An unknown but large proportion of them, he knew, harbored the strange slow life of the extremophile nanobacteria, and the innumerable fast minds that that life sustained.
They chipped some interesting mats of yellow, stinking extremophile bacteria and netted a few specimens of a small spider that skittered across the algae-clogged pools, but that was it.
In a very restricted habitat there would be no evolutionary motor to drive changes because there would be no new environments to exploit Just as in the case of extremophile archaebacteria on Earth.
How could she know anything about the tea or about the extremophile research?
By the twenty-eighth, with the exception of a few extremophile organisms buried deep underground, there were no living things left alive on Earth.
Archaeons a bizarre domain of single-celled organisms called extremophiles -- lovers of extreme conditions.
The book ends with a look at the latest thinking on the origins of life, a question made much more interesting by the discovery of extremophiles -- creatures that live comfortably in environments formerly considered hostile to life, such as under the arctic ice or in acid pools near volcanic vents.
We have only one data point to study it from, because we never will know if Martian extremophiles spores are related to ones on Earth.
The realities of the extraordinary existences tolerated by the extremophiles, in our bacterial worlds, broadens the scope of life as it could develop elsewhere, and the growing awareness of planets other than ours, likewise.
I was about to say I did too know about extremophiles, and even had my own experiment going with the UV-protective cuticle on frost flowers, but Dr.
By studying the biochemistry of extremophiles, scientists can guess at the types of organism that can be found on other planets.
A good jolt of radiation smashes up their genetic structures the same way it would smash up yours or mine, but the big difference is that extremophiles somehow put themselves back together within a few hours.
Nabdullah, 2054) that extremophiles under worsening conditions react to the stress by slowing metabolisms to rates in which cell divisions occur less than once a century.
Rates of mutation in extremophiles that have radically slowed their metabolisms are not yet certain, but there are strong indications that they may be well over a magnitude slower than described by earlier estimates (cf.