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Not good news for interplanetary travel.
Trees aren't obsolete yet but this hybrid system can do amazing things.
Amoebophilus doesn't play around.
Used sponges are teeming with bacteria. You should better replace them weekly instead of sanitizing them.
It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Hot water might be more comfortable but it's wasted energy when it comes to sanitizing your hands.
There's little evidence probiotics helps you medically.
Bacteria are getting tougher but scientists are not sitting idle.
Aww, they have tiny economic agreements, ain't that cute?
*pause*
Life can be surprisingly hardy.
Some of them are a hairsbreadth away from infecting us with impunity.
Scientists have built cells that are not living but are so life-like that other cells can communicate with them.
Worry and excitement, all in one paper.
Some of your bases are belong to us.
Happy gut bacteria are the best bacteria.
Don't go overboard with tonight's dinner, though.
Who needs oxygen when you got ... sulfur?
The intellectual reward of Microbes from Hell is a pleasure, despite an occasionally challenging journey.
You're pretty safe unless one coughs on you.
Meeting at the United Nations, world leaders agreed that we are facing an unprecedented threat from drug-resistant bacteria.
Comes with benefits, but also risks. At the end of the day just use a band-aid.
The new stars in bug-killing.
A fascinating glimpse at how life overcomes adversity.
Bacteria are creating whole new ecosystems in fracking wells.
Named black silicon, the material literally stabs bacteria to death.
Developing countries, yet again, will be the most vulnerable in the face of such risks.
Tiny robots might soon replace invasive surgery.
Things are looking bad for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Make your data evolve!
Daniel G. Nocera, the Harvard professor who made headlines five years ago when he unveiled an artificial leaf, recently unveiled his latest work: an engineered bacteria that converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into alcohols and biomass.
A strain of E. coli resistant to last-resort antibiotics has been identified on United States soil for the first time. Health officials say this could be the end of the road for antibiotics, leaving us virtually helpless in fighting future infections.
Canadian aboriginals have been using clay to treat their ailments for centuries.
Even though they're genetically identical and live in the same environment, not all bacteria are the same. When times are tough more bacteria become individualists gobbling resources in the detriment of the colony, but in doing so the individualists actually enhance the colony's survival rate.
There's good bacteria and bad bacteria, but the gut seems to be so diverse in its bacterial offering from person to person that scientists have always found it difficult to say "hey, this is what a healthy microbiome should look like." Analyzing thousands of bacteria species in your guy is challenging and we're still not there, but a recent effort involving 4,000 participants has some good hints as to what makes a healthy gut.
On the desk of Seokheun "Sean" Choi sits a 3x3 array that at first glance looks like a lemon squeezer. It is, in fact, a solar panel but not like any you've seen or heard about before. Instead of using semiconductors like silicon crystals to convert sunlight into electricity, the array employs a complex system that nurtures cyanobacteria -- beings whose metabolism create free electrons which can be harnessed.
Mouth microbes may be connected to a variety of illnesses, more and more studies are showing. Dental care has been disconnected from general health care for many years now, but the more you start to think about it, the stranger it seems. After all, you don’t really separate any other branch of medicine so… why […]
Biological engineers have created a programming language that allows them to rapidly and efficiently program and design DNA-encoded circuits, giving new functions to living cells. There are already a myriad of programming languages. Fortran and C++ allow for rapid computations, PHP is a scripting language for web development, Ruby is a popular object-oriented language – […]
When researchers started raising 48 bacteria species aboard the International Space Station, they weren’t really sure what to expect. They wanted to see how the microorganisms would adapt to living in microgravity, but one species hasn’t only adapted – it’s doing better than on Earth. According to a recent study, Bacillus safensis JPL-MERTA-8-2 – a strain […]
Morgan Beeby and his colleagues at the Imperial College London used electron microscopy to image these biological motors in high resolution and three dimensions for the first time.
A new study found that whole populations of bacteria retain their tolerance to stressors for a much longer duration than individual cells.
Purple Non Sulfur Bacteria may play a role in reducing the amount of methyl-mercury in the oceans by converting it to a less harmful form.Sincerely,
Scientists are experimenting with a novel mechanism that destroys harmful bacteria that uses light-activated nanoparticles. These are called quantum dots and are typically used by the semi-conductor industry, in solar cells and other applications. When specifically tweaked in size and composition, these tiny particles interact with cells and kill over 90% of bacteria.
Humans are walking ecosystems. Each of us carries around about 100 trillion microbes in and on our bodies, which make up our microbiome. The quality of this bacterial community has a lot to say about our health and well-being. The blend of microbes is also surprisingly unique, which says a lot about who we are […]
Researchers detected unusually high levels of toxic metals, including the dangerous neurotoxin methylmercury, in a pristine coastal area and lake. This was surprising given there were no nearby industrial sites or other runoff pollution sites. They found that the toxic substances were leached by two unexpected sources: moulting elephant seals and bacteria.
In 2011 the Queller-Strassmann lab, then at Rice University, made a surprising announcement in Nature Letters. They had been collecting single-celled amoebae of the species Dictyostelium discoideum from the soil in Virginia and Minnesota. While laboratory grown strain of Dicty happily fed on the bacteria provided for it by its keepers, roughly one third of the wild strains showed a green (or maybe bacterial) thumb. When food was short, they gathered up bacteria, carried them to new sites and seeded the soil with them.
Engineering microorganisms may be the key to solving major environmental problems, particularly the accumulation of greenhouse gases and fossil fuel overconsumption.
This "drawing" might look like it was made by a kid in grade school, but make no mistake it symbolizes one of the biggest achievements in 21st century biology. This San Diego beach scene was actually drawn in an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed. Effectively, this is a picture literally drawn with life.
Some news outlets were quick to label beards as toilets. I disagree.
US researchers have imaged for the first time ultra-small bacteria, whose existence has been debatable for the past couple of decades. Now, these tiny bacteria have been confirmed after samples coming from groundwater were analyzed with state of the art techniques. Very little is know about these enigmatic creatures, but it's believed they play an important role in microbial ecosystems, despite their tiny cells harbor limited resources. The cells have an average volume of 0.009 cubic microns (one micron is one millionth of a meter). About 150 of these bacteria could fit inside an Escherichia coli cell and more than 150,000 cells could fit onto the tip of a human hair.
