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Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware
- kanobo 6y agoI love unusual discoveries like this. Reminds me of watching the Star Trek TNG episode about silicon-based lifeforms as a kid and wishing real-life had more strange discoveries like that.
- tastyfreeze 6y agoCool! The manganese nodules part reminds me of gold excreting bacteria bacteria. https://www.livescience.com/61804-bacteria-poops-gold.html https://www.livescience.com/61804-bacteria-poops-gold.html
- donclark 6y agoCan this affect our mouth and gut bacteria?
- DoreenMichele 6y agoProbably, but possibly only under the right conditions.
- _whiteCaps_ 6y ago'Oily' film on puddles can be caused by iron and manganese reacting bacteria: https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/microbes/intro.html https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/microbes/intro.html You can determine the origin by disturbing the film, if it 'shatters', it's bacterial.
- LoSboccacc 6y agolove how the image is a gif that includes the border, the shadow and the margins, looks like this site has been running along for quite a while (also because of the center tag) and it's a testament to how simple, good engineering last for a long time.
- zenexer 6y agoI won’t dispute that it probably looks great on a proper monitor, but that site is painful to use on mobile. The width is fixed, which means that either the text us illegibly small, or I have to scroll side-to-side to see the entirety of each line as I read.
- LoSboccacc 6y agothe site doesn't have any fixed width in the css and adding in a meta header identifying it as responsive, it works as it should. arguably is the user agent assumption that every old site is broken without giving them a large virtual viewport with a small font that's giving an unwanted behavior.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cptvideo 6y agoI had a microbiologist friend who said: "If you can name something, there's a bacterium that will eat it".
- Uehreka 6y agoSounds like a fun HN comment game, let’s go: Formaldehyde.
- oseibonsu 6y agoR. sphaeroides https://news.wisc.edu/microbe-eats-formaldehyde/#:~:text=Enter%20R.,for%20more%20than%20two%20decades https://news.wisc.edu/microbe-eats-formaldehyde/#:~:text=Ent....
- Uehreka 6y agoOh nice. Let’s kick it up a notch: Chlorine Trifluoride.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoProbably one of the chlorine-breathing microbes. Of course, the hard part is discovering the exact microbe that eats a given compound and publishing/finding an exact paper on it, not naming compounds. Which input sha256s into d4667a67e71436947c7ff89f31379aeb82d2044f74dbad776941fcd91585e318?3
- Uehreka 6y agoI feel like the hardest part would be convincing Chlorine Trifluoride to exist long enough for something to eat it, this one may be unfair. My last request for the night: Enriched Uranium.
- boilerupnc 6y agoGeobacter, Geothrix and Dyella species, as well as a novel—potentially predatory—Bacteroidetes species, and a new member of class Anaerolineae (Chloroflexi). Additionally, a population of methanogenic Methanocella species. [0] [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29128951/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29128951/
- shmerl 6y agoThis reminded me of fungus that can feed on gamma radiation.
- WalterBright 6y agoShould drop bags of these extremeophiles onto the solar system's moons and planets.
- gonzo41 6y agoProbably more likely we'll find extremophiles like these at those locations. Also I think there's treaties stopping you from polluting other planets.
- WalterBright 6y agoIs Earthly life pollution?
- Iolaum 6y agoYes it is if you put it on an extraterrestrial place. This is why space agencies do a thorough decontamination before sending satellites to other planets.
- WalterBright 6y agoThat will assure the extinction of Earthly life.
- ben_w 6y agoIt’s the only way to tell if any life we find out there was native or just something we brought with us on the probe.
- TomMarius 6y agoThat's not exactly true as life unrelated to ours would be at least a little different, but it would help us if there is common origin - then that life would be very much alike ours and we would need to do a serious investigation about possible contamination.
- em3rgent0rdr 6y ago> Leadbetter found the bacteria serendipitously after performing unrelated experiments "Leadbetter" is quite an appropriate name for the researcher. ;)
- logicchains 6y agoYou might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism.
- jcun4128 6y agoI still want to figure out how to make an artificial stomach that digests plastic and produces electricity. I just imagine building drones that eat the plastic in the ocean for fuel. Down to the microplastic too eg. mini whales ha.
- aliswe 6y agoThis reminds me of the different fungi that "eat oil spills": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23869741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23869741 And the research done by Paul Stamets (I think?) EDIT: Why do you think that never took off?
- jagannathtech 6y ago>Why do you think that never took off? Maybe takes a lot of time and no expensive contracts and kickbacks ;)