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.

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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.

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Diagram of a typical Prokaryotic microbe

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 it was present.

However, the precise date (within a few million years or so) of this event has been a point of contention amongst scientists for decades. Most have held that such life did not emerge until (no earlier than) 2.4 billion years ago. A few have radically asserted an even earlier date of nearly three and half billion years ago.

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searocket plants (cakile maritima)

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.

If the searocket is place in beds with plants that are not related to it, it will begin to stimulate its root system to grow more rapidly, which is a tactic that many plants use automatically in order to compete with others (for space, light, nutrients, etc.), indiscriminate of relatedness. But when placed in pots with related (sibling) plants, the searocket does not do this. Somehow–and no one has discovered how yet–the plant is able to detect similarities and differences (perhaps genetic, chemical, or physiological) in its local, vegetative environment. Many animals are not able to do this.

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Scanning electron micrograph of Escherichia coli

Using two different model organisms–the E. coli bacterium and the single-celled yeast–scientist have begun unraveling a puzzling behavior of many micro-organisms: the ability to “predict” a change in environmental conditions.

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.

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Researchers in have discovered ancient, extremophile life forms that survive with neither light nor oxygen underground in Antarctica.

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.

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Image courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Owing to the extreme conditions, the community is not very diverse-with only a handful of species appearing, chief of which are the bacillus-like species thiomicrospira and desulfocapsa. These unique microbes are specially adapted to the underground environment and are able to utilize sulfur compounds to extract iron from the surrounding rock, which, along with carbon, is actively cycled through the cell to drive its key energy-harnessing and metabolic functions. Once excreted, the iron reacts with oxygen (in the water) and forms rust, which is the reason for the rusty-reddish color of the meltwater, and the name Blood Falls). The microbes are also adapted to an environment high in chlorides and sulfates, which are normally poisonous to many other microorganisms.

Such rare and isolated microbial communities give scientists a glimpse of the conditions on the early Earth that may have produced the first single-celled life forms. Scientist known as astrobiologists believe that by studying such extremophilic environments and organisms here on earth, they might shed light on the possibility of finding such lifeforms–or the “proto-biotic” environments that give rise to them–existing on other worlds,  starting with those of our own solar system. Candidate, extra-terrestrial environments include: underneath the icecaps of Mars,  within the ice-blanketed oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or amongst the underground, and the sub-surface, cryo-volcanic flows of Saturn’s “planet-like” moon, Titan (the only moon possessing an atmosphere).

Reporting in the April 17 edition of Science Magazine, the team of explorers was lead by Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also of the University of Montana, and Harvard University), with support from the National Science Foundation.

Image credit: Zina Deretsky/NSF

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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