This writer contacted lead researcher David Graham and asked him to explain how these antibiotic resistant soil microbes and/or genes might impact humans. “The genes themselves do not get passed directly to humans per se. The genes get passed from exposed bacteria to bacteria whom might ultimately end up in humans, some of which might be pathogenic. An example is on food or in water that has been exposed to resistance bacteria.”
It’s been a busy Fall for the making-fuel-out-of-pollution-using-nothing-but-the-power-of-the-sun crowd. First we heard about a company that says it has succeeded in creating a system that uses engineered microbes in reactors out in the desert to eat carbon dioxide and poop out diesel and ethanol. Next we heard about a crazy mirror-ring contraption that reaches amazingly high temperatures to force carbon dioxide to give up one oxygen to make a precursor to fuel. And now…
Researchers at UCLA have engineered a bacteria that can eat carbon dioxide and burp out butanol—a liquid fuel that can be substituted into our existing fuel infrastructure without modification. Yep, that’s right, even your old jalopy can burn butanol without any side effects.
Overeating on holidays like Thanksgiving is more than acceptable in our culture - it’s expected.
Why not binge on mashed potatoes, gravy, and pecan pie? Thanksgiving only comes once a year, after all. Sure, you might gain a few pounds over the holiday season, but you have until New Year’s to worry about those.
New research suggests that the holiday binge might have a less visible effect than the extra weight around your midsection. Switching from a healthy diet to one high in fat and sugar - even for just a day - might allow obesity-linked microbes to dominate the communities of microorganisms found in your gut.
In what could be a major breakthrough, Joule Biotechnologies announced that it has directly produced fuel from the plentiful carbon dioxide in the air around us using highly engineered photosynthetic microbes.
The first time I popped a jelly belly bean into my mouth, I was taken aback. It was a chilly mango jelly belly and I hadn’t checked. I both admired and resented the audacity of the tiny thing. Chilly - that sensation that makes our tingle is actually more complex than it seems and has recently been on the scientific research radar.
Most fascinating about the chilli plant is that its fruit is the chilli seed. Normally used to entice insects [...]
At some point in the geologic history of this planet, primitive, unicellular organisms (prokaryotes) emerged and proliferated. These primitive microbes were able to harness the Sun’s energy and convert it to food. The metabolic “waste product” of this photosynthetic (light-making) activity–Oxygen (O)–filled the Earth’s atmosphere over the course of vast time scales. This is sometimes referred to as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). This geologically long event enabled the “explosion” of oxygen-breathing life forms in nearly every environment where [...]
In another addition to the “secret life” (and mysterious abilities) of plants, a recent study demonstrated that a native, perennial plant, The Great Lakes Searocket (Cakile edentula), responds to the presence of related and non-related plants differently.
It has been assumed for most of the history of micro-biological science that such micro-organisms are purely “reflexive”; they simply respond and adapt to external stimuli (such as exposure to chemicals, heat stress, or drugs). But research over he past 2 years by two different scientific teams (a Princeton team lead by Saeed Tavazoie, and, a team from the Weizmann Institute in Israel) is shaking up present understanding and over-turning basic assumptions.
From the surface, the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Eastern Antarctica appears to be one of the most desolate places on Earth. And indeed it is. Apart from a few glaciers, the land is ice-free. No animals live here, and what few plants are able to are simple planktonic forms. But recently, a team of researchers have discovered evidence of a thriving community of extremophile microbes thriving several hundred feet below the barren surface.
Humans might have ushered Earth into the Anthropocene, but we’d be unwise to ignore the fact that we’re always going to be living in the Age of Microbes, according to a new article in Microbiology Today. “Microbes will continue as climate engineers long after humans have burned that [...]
As you’ve almost certainly already heard by now, General Motors has announced a partnership with Coskata, Inc. to produce ethanol less expensively and without using food materials as feedstock for the process. This is exciting for a number of reasons. First of all, Coskata is close to completing a continuous demonstration stream at their laboratory. They also expect to have a pilot demonstration plant in place by the end of the year that will produce 40,000 gallons of ethanol. And later this year, they expect to announce the site for their first full-scale plant which will be capable of annual production of 100 million gallons of ethanol. The process also consumes less water resources (less than one gallon of water per gallon of ethanol produced) and delivers 7.7 units of energy per unit of energy used in the process.
The process relies on using anaerobic microbes that consume carbon monoxide and hydrogen and produce ethanol. Because the process uses specially bred strains of microbes, they produce ethanol exclusively, unlike other fermentation processes, which often produce a range of alcohols and which require further distillation. Furthermore, the flexibility of the Coskata process allows for other microbes to be used in the same process setup (or even a parallel setup). Other strains of microbes that produce other useful alcohols, including some used as precursors for plastic production, so that the same technology could be used in other applications to provide a petroleum replacement.
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