Deep Earth Is Teeming with Mysterious Life
It may seem fantastical, but there is a living world deep, deep beneath our feet. Go below the soil, beyond the…
Report: NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date
Whether it’s rovers rolling about on Mars, probes drilling into asteroids, or Tesla Roadsters drifting through space,…
There's Life on the Closest Thing We Have to Mars
A new study has documented for the first time how certain microorganisms are able to survive the extreme aridity of…
Humans, Not Rats, May Have Been Responsible for Spreading the Black Death
The Black Death, a plague responsible for killing around a third of the population of Europe during the 14th century,…
A Dreaded Superbug Has Officially Arrived in the United States
The US Centers for Disease Control has released a report in which it identifies over a dozen cases of a deadly,…
This Smartphone Microscope Lets You Play Games With Microbes
Introducing the LudusScope, a 3D-printed, open-sourced system that lets you control and play games with living microbes…
We've Been Wrong About Lichen For 150 Years
Hundreds of millions of years ago, a tiny green microbe joined forces with a fungus, and together they conquered the…
New Trick Helps Winemakers Figure Out Which Microbes Make Good Wine
Winemaking is always an exercise in uncertainty. You don’t really know just what the wine will taste like until the…
This Little Bot Walks on Water and Runs on Bacteria
Here’s a way to make environmental cleanup more fun: Next time you’ve got a polluted waterway, just unleash a swarm of…
NASA Is Sending Bacteria to the Edge of Space to See if They Can Hitchhike to Mars
Discovering life on another planet, only to contaminate that world with our own pesky microbes, is one of NASA’s…
Ancient Microbes Found Alive Deep Beneath the Ocean Floor
Researchers working off the Shimokita Peninsula in Japan have discovered living microbes buried 8,000 feet below the…
Chemists Create Microbial “Fight Clubs” to Find New Medicines
By pitting various strains of bacteria against one another, researchers from Vanderbilt University have stumbled upon a…
Why Scientists Have Been Scared of Space Germs for Almost 50 Years
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was one of the few things the U.S. and the Soviet Union managed to agree on at the height…
Meanwhile in the Future: When Antibiotics Stop Working
This week’s episode of Meanwhile in the Future gets very scary, very quickly. And we’re not going all that far into the…
Chlorine Treatment Can Accelerate Antibiotic Resistance, Study Says
As anyone who's ever owned a pet fish or gone to a public swimming pool knows, chlorine is commonly used to disinfect…
The Ancient Secrets of a "Bleeding" Glacier Are Finally Being Revealed
Against vast whiteness of Antarctica, Blood Falls bleeds a deep dramatic red. The color comes from iron-rich ancient…
Ancient Microbes May Have Created the World's Largest Gold Mines
Nearly half the gold ever mined comes from the Witwatersrand Basin, a layer of gold-flecked rock that spreads out under…
What Would Happen If All The Earth's Microbes Suddenly Disappeared?
It's generally agreed that life on this planet would not be possible if it weren't for microbes. In a fascinating…