Welcome to another edition of Cool Stuff Ride Home. My name's Marcus Paff on today's episode,

Laser Beam Weapons, no longer, perhaps, just the stuff of science fiction. And with all this talk of

outer space, what about those areas right here on Earth that we've yet to explore? A fascinating

discovery of life at the ocean's

deepest depths. All that and of course a look at this day in history coming up on cool stuff.

Here's a story you may have missed from CNN and author Marlowe Starling. Geochemist Mangrand

Doe had 30 minutes left in her submersible mission when she decided to explore

one last stretch of the trenches that lie between Russia and Alaska, about 19,000 to 30,000

feet below the ocean's surface in what's called the Hidal Zone. She said she began to notice, quote

unquote, amazing creatures,

including various species of clam and tube worm that had never been recorded so deep below the

surface. What Deuce stumbled upon was a roughly 1,550 mile stretch of what her team says

is the deepest known ecosystem of organisms that use the chemical compound methane instead of sunlight to survive.

Doe is a co-lead author of a study describing the findings that was published July 30th in the journal Nature.

The Hidal Zone is primarily comprised of oceanic trenches and troughs, some of the deepest and least explored environments on Earth.

A professor and researcher at the Institute of Deep Sea Science and Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences,

Doe explains, quote, life needs tricks to survive and thrive there, end quote.

One of those tricks lies in bacteria that have evolved to live inside the clams and tube

worms, this according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.

The bacteria convert methane and hydrogen sulfide from cold seeps.

Those are cracks in the seafloor that leak these compounds as fluids into energy and food that the host animal can use, allowing organisms to live in zero sunlight conditions.

Now, after analyzing sediment samples collected from the expedition, Dewe and her team said they detected high concentrations of methane.

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