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ScienceSpace & SpaceflightMicrobes Can Mine Valuable Elements From Rocks in Space
Recent experiments aboard the International Space Station have shown that some microbes can harvest valuable rare-earth elements from rocks, even when exposed to microgravity conditions. The unexpected finding shows how microbes could boost our ability to live and work in space. On Earth, some microscopic organisms have shown their worth as effective miners, extracting rare-earth … Continued
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ScienceSpace & SpaceflightNow That Venus Is a Candidate for Alien Life, What’s Next?
Our minds were blown yesterday as a team of researchers reported on the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus—a potential sign of life. The discovery will undoubtedly renew scientific interest in our closest planetary neighbor. Here’s what should happen next, and how scientists could confirm—or deny—the presence of life within the Venusian clouds. … Continued
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Tech NewsNewsAncient Microbes Spring to Life After 100 Million Years Under the Seafloor
Scientists have revived microbes found deep beneath the seafloor in 100-million-year-old sediment, dramatically expanding our view of where life exists on Earth and for how long. An international team of scientists led by geomicrobiologist Yuki Morono from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology has revived microbes pulled from energy-poor seafloor sediments dated to … Continued
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EartherIt Could Take Decades for the Ocean Floor to Recover From Deep Sea Mining
A new study has found that the impacts of deep sea mining are still felt a quarter of a century later. As the need for metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt mount, some have looked to harvest them from a vast field of metal-rich rocks called polymetallic nodules in the Pacific. Yet there haven’t been … Continued
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EartherConservationA Newly Discovered Microbe Feasts on a Particularly Problematic Plastic
Like other forms of discarded plastic, polyurethane waste threatens the environment and human health. In an encouraging new development, European scientists have stumbled upon a hardy strain of bacteria that appears to thrive off the stuff. New research published in Frontiers in Microbiology describes a newly identified strain of soil bacterium that’s capable of breaking … Continued
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Tech NewsLife Is Thriving 2,600 Feet Beneath the Seafloor
You won’t see many living things above the ocean surface hundreds of miles southeast of Madagascar—an albatross or the occasional fishing vessel may break up the hours of solitude. But beneath the surface, lava from Earth’s mantle has uplifted a long, underwater mountain range with a flat top extending 5 kilometers above the seafloor. Its … Continued
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ScienceSpace & SpaceflightThis Meteorite-Munching Microbe Might Explain How Life Emerged on Earth
Meteorites are an unappreciated food source for a specific metal-loving microorganism, according to new research. The finding could reveal an entirely new chemistry that facilitated the emergence of life on Earth—or possibly even how life got here in the first place. The beautifully named Metallosphaera sedula is capable of consuming and processing “extraterrestrial material,” as … Continued
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ScienceSpace & SpaceflightWe Should Deliberately Contaminate Mars With Our Microbes, Controversial Study Argues
A research team is proposing a major philosophical shift in our thinking about the spread of Earthly microbes in space and on Mars in particular. Believing interplanetary contamination to be “inevitable,” the team argues that future Martian colonists should use microorganisms to reshape the Red Planet—a proposition deemed grossly premature by some experts. In a … Continued
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EartherEarth ScienceDeep Earth Is Teeming with Mysterious Life
It may seem fantastical, but there is a living world deep, deep beneath our feet. Go below the soil, beyond the bedrock, and you’ll find a hot, sweaty underworld teeming with life that puts the surface biosphere to shame. Just how much life is down there has been an open question that the 1,200 scientists … Continued
By Brian Kahn -
ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Report: NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date
Whether it’s rovers rolling about on Mars, probes drilling into asteroids, or Tesla Roadsters drifting through space, it’s clear that our activities in the Solar System are changing. Accordingly, methods and rules to prevent our germs from spreading beyond Earth need to be updated, according to a new report aimed squarely at NASA. Current NASA … Continued
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EartherEarth Science
There’s Life on the Closest Thing We Have to Mars
A new study has documented for the first time how certain microorganisms are able to survive the extreme aridity of Chile’s Atacama Desert—the world’s driest—by going dormant for decades. To survive years without even a drop of rain, the microbes bide their time in a suspended state. When the rain finally arrives, they reactivate and … Continued
By Ari Phillips -
Tech News
Humans, Not Rats, May Have Been Responsible for Spreading the Black Death
The Black Death, a plague responsible for killing around a third of the population of Europe during the 14th century, spread to millions of humans by rats that carried infected fleas—right? That’s the story we’ve long been told by historians. A new study upends this conventional thinking, showing that humans, and not rodents, were the … Continued
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Tech News
A Dreaded Superbug Has Officially Arrived in the United States
The US Centers for Disease Control has released a report in which it identifies over a dozen cases of a deadly, antibiotic-resistant fungus called Candida auris. It’s the first time this super-strain has been found in the US, and disturbingly, four of the first seven patients infected with it have died. Scientists have known about … Continued
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Tech NewsThis Smartphone Microscope Lets You Play Games With Microbes
Introducing the LudusScope, a 3D-printed, open-sourced system that lets you control and play games with living microbes on your smartphone. Tormenting single-celled organisms has never been so much fun. LudusScope was developed by Stanford engineer Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, and he envisioned it as a new way of interacting and learning about common microbes. It’s meant for … Continued
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Tech NewsWe’ve Been Wrong About Lichen For 150 Years
Hundreds of millions of years ago, a tiny green microbe joined forces with a fungus, and together they conquered the world. It’s a tale of two cross-kingdom organisms, one providing food and the one other shelter, and it’s been our touchstone example of symbiosis for 150 years. Trouble is, that story is nowhere near complete. … Continued
By Maddie Stone -
Tech News
New Trick Helps Winemakers Figure Out Which Microbes Make Good Wine
Winemaking is always an exercise in uncertainty. You don’t really know just what the wine will taste like until the very end of the process, which is sometimes decades long. A new technique, however, could help predict what wine will taste like before it’s even made. A paper out today in mBio from researchers at … Continued
By Ria Misra -
Tech News
This Little Bot Walks on Water and Runs on Bacteria
Here’s a way to make environmental cleanup more fun: Next time you’ve got a polluted waterway, just unleash a swarm of tiny, bacteria-nomming robots on it. In a few years, that crazy idea might just be possible. Researchers at the University of Bristol recently unveiled Row-Bot, an autonomous robot that paddles across dirty waterways slurping … Continued
By Maddie Stone -
ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
NASA Is Sending Bacteria to the Edge of Space to See if They Can Hitchhike to Mars
Discovering life on another planet, only to contaminate that world with our own pesky microbes, is one of NASA’s nightmare scenarios. To find out whether single-celled Earthlings can hitchhike to Mars and survive on the Red Planet’s surface, NASA is going to see how they like it 120,000 feet up. Today, weather permitting, a helium … Continued
By Maddie Stone
