Scientists are making headway in learning about our great-grand-germ Grandma, is that you? Scientists who have tried to understand early life on Earth say LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, may have been a rod-shaped organism like this one. Usis/iStock/Getty Images Plus Scientists want to identify your earliest ancestor. And to do that, they have […]
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For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be,
No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all Read More »
Decomposing animals host diverse ecosystems that reveal the inner workings of microbial life. A threadlike rain has started falling sideways. Jennifer DeBruyn slows down to consider whether to drive us off the pavement and onto parallel tracks of matted grass leading up a steep, slick hill. I can’t see the top, but there’s a faint
Life Among the Dead Read More »
Last May, scientists reported that they’d successfully grown plants in moon soil for the first time. At the University of Florida’s Space Plants Lab in Gainesville, a dozen Arabidopsis thaliana plants germinated and grew, each in a few teaspoons of lunar regolith — the dusty material that covers much of the moon. “The first surprise was that
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Chelsea Wood always wanted to be a marine biologist. As a child growing up on New York’s Long Island, she envisioned traveling the world, studying big animals that live in the ocean. “There was just never any question in my mind,” she says. Then, during college, she worked in a lab that focused on parasitic
Some ecologists value parasites — and now want a plan to save them Read More »
Twenty-eight years ago, computational biologists led by John Moult then at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, launched an ambitious, large-scale experiment designed to answer one of the most challenging open questions in biology: How can researchers determine the structure of any protein? Structure is key to understanding biological function because a the shape of a
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Bacteria can have superpowers. Some flourish in almost any environment. Others can transform toxic materials into harmless sludge. A bacterium called Shewanella oneidensis can do both. But this microbe also has a much rarer superpower: It absorbs and produces electricity. In fact, new research suggests, these bacteria may be able to use energy collected from wind or
Genes point to how some bacteria can gobble up electricity Read More »
One bright morning in November 2018, state biologists in Louisiana loaded three dead and toothy alligators, each more than 5 feet long and weighing hundreds of pounds, into the back of a pickup. The biologists bumped along Louisiana State Route 56, driving the carcasses as far south as one can go before plunging into the
Bringing Out the Dead Read More »
The emergency surgery took place in the back of a modified pickup truck in a McDonald’s parking lot in Pikeville, Ky. This scrappy plan to rescue a species of mussel on the edge of extinction made perfect sense: Meet somewhere between Indian Creek in Virginia, where the last known wild golden riffleshells lived, and Kentucky’s
The Golden Riffleshell’s Appalachian Roadtrip Read More »
Some of the smallest, most useful machines known to science are the biological molecules that keep living things living. The protein myosin drives the contraction and relaxation of muscle. Kinesin drags cellular cargo around the cell. Motor enzymes unwind, rewind, and maintain DNA, and bacteria use a molecular motor to rotate their whip-like flagella up
What’s the best way to build a molecular machine? Read More »
