Results tagged “bacteria” from 60 Second Science

Despite the threat of a future in which we have few defenses against deadly bacterial infections, Americans don't seem to be too freaked out. We're still awfully good at over-using antibiotics (by, for instance, using them to treat the wrong types of infections) and not completing antibiotic treatment, both of which increase the risk of bacterial resistance, according to an abstract presented today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Georgia.

Continue reading 'Americans not particularly worried about antibiotic resistance' >

Thanks so much for the massive outpouring of new name suggestions! Keep sending 'em. We're taking next week off, but then after that... a newly named show will emerge from the glistening chrysalis of the old.

And now, the all-apocalypse episode: a doomsday vault for seeds, tracking a killer asteroid, targeting antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and contemplating a real-life Cylon attack.

Created, written & designed by John Pavlus / Screencasts produced by Smashcut Media / Music by Jeff Alvarez

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Remember how when you were little and it rained, your parents told you God is crying because you did something wrong? Turns out it's actually just a whole host of bacteria coalescing into ice and plummeting back to Earth. Because you did something wrong.

Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, with colleagues in Montana and France, reported today in Science that most ice nucleators, particles ice forms around, found in snow at mid- and high-latitude locations were biological in origin. I.e., it's just just the yellow snow you need to worry about. It's pretty much all filled with creepy crawlies (or, more appropriately, fearsome flagellum).

Their guess, then, is that the bacteria affects the rain cycle or actually causes their own precipitation.

Continue reading 'Why's it raining? Bacteria. That's why.' >

When it comes to the threat of antibiotic resistance, the World Health Organization doesn't mince words: some diseases, it says, "will have no effective therapies within the next ten years." Indeed, more than 70 percent of the bacteria that cause hospital-acquired infections are resistant to at least one of the antibiotics commonly used to treat them, and it's only going to get worse. But a chemical found on amphibian skin—produced in response to stress, injury, or contact with microorganisms—has just been found to kill some drug-resistant bacteria.

Continue reading 'Could frogs save us from MRSA?' >

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For the first time ever, scientists announced last week that they have finally successfully created an entire synthetic genome. Working diligently in the lab, scientists were able to stitch together the DNA of the smallest known free-living bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium. The research is hailed as a groundbreaking event in genetic manipulation that will one day lead to the "routine" creation of synthetic genomes—possibly including chromosomes in larger animals like mammals.

This accomplishment marks the next big step in creating entire synthetic life forms. The new work is the second step in a three-step process, said research leader Hamilton Smith, a biologist and Nobel laureate at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.
The first step was reported last year also by the same team at Venter's institute, with the successful transplantation of a genome from one species of bacteria into another, which effectively switched the organism’s identity.

Continue reading 'Synthetic Life: Two Down, One to Go' >

I always knew feces was the key to complex life -- why do you think the best jokes involve poop? Scientists have long sought to explain the evolutionary explosion of life that occurred 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period; this population boom eventually gave rise to the ancestors of complex life. Biogeochemist Graham Logan argues that feces-producing creatures, which actually arrived about 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian, were the key that enabled single-celled organisms to expand.

Before pooping creatures, bacteria consumed most of the available oxygen. Plankton produced oxygen slowly, but bacteria would consume most of it in order to digest dead plankton. The dearth of oxygen didn't allow for much multicellular development.

Then the crappers came to the rescue.

Continue reading 'What gave rise to complex life on earth? Poop! (maybe)' >

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When most people think of aliens, they think of little green men with almond eyes.

But when physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist Paul Davies sat down to imagine what they might actually look like, he turned to the world of the very small.

Artist and illustrator Jean-Francois Podevin took Davies' ideas about improbably tiny alien bacteria, silicon based life-forms, and the potential that life arose more than once, and turned them into some of the most stunning illustrations ever seen in Scientific American.

Related: November cover story, Are Aliens Among Us?

Today's 60 Second Science podcast is brought to you by the bees, but not so much the birds:

Honey sticks it to wounds

Full transcript after the jump...

Continue reading 'Honey sticks it to wounds [podcast]' >