What’s the News: A group of physicists say they’ve found a way to account for the mysterious radio signals that may be emanating from colonies of E. coli—and it’s not because they’re trying to get our attention.

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What’s the News: Scientists are using nanoparticles to develop ways to fight bacteria that are resistant to conventional antibiotics. These tiny drugs physically punch holes through bacteria instead of killing them chemically, which means that they could be especially effective on antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains like the dangerous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). “The applications are going to be very diverse, whether we’re talking about wound healing or dressing, skin infection, and quite possibly injections into the bloodstream,” James Hedrick, master inventor at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, told Popular Science.

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In the future, nuclear clean-up workers may be getting help from some surprising sources. None of these three methods are in widespread use right now, but they show promise:

1) Algae

• Scientists have discovered that a type of algae can precipitate strontium into crystals. This could lead to better nuclear clean-up techniques, potentially sequestering radioactive strontium-90 from tainted water into crystalline form, which is easier to contain.
• The algae, called C. moniliferum, collects strontium in sulfate-rich vacuoles, and because strontium and barium have low solubility in sulfate solutions, they precipitate out of solution as crystals.

What’s the Context: The danger of strontium-90 is that it is chemically similar to calcium, and so can be taken up into milk, bones, and other tissues. Nuclear waste and spills can contain significant amounts of strontium; C. moniliferum is especially helpful because it can precipitate strontium but leave calcium alone (calcium is different enough from barium that the bacteria doesn’t crystallize it).

Not So Fast: Scientists don’t yet know how well the algae can withstand radioactivity, which could potentially put a damper on this clean-up method. Now, the scientists would like to find ways of increasing sulphate levels in the environment, which may in turn increase the ability of the algae to crystallize strontium.

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Modern microscopes opened up the world of the minute to an amazing degree, allowing people to see all the way down to a bacterium wriggling on a slide. But if you want to see down even smaller in regular optical light—to a virus, a cell’s interior, or other objects on the nanoscale—you’ve been out of luck. Those objects are smaller than 200 nanometers, what’s been considered the resolution limit for microscopes scanning in white light, and so the only was to see them was through indirect imaging devices like scanning electron microscopes.

Not anymore. Lin Li and colleagues report a new way using tiny beads to resolve images at 50 nanometers, shattering the limit for what can be seen in optical light.

Their technique, reported in Nature Communications, makes use of “evanescent waves“, emitted very near an object and usually lost altogether. Instead, the beads gather the light and re-focus it, channelling it into a standard microscope. This allowed researchers to see with their own eyes a level of detail that is normally restricted to indirect methods such as atomic force microscopy or scanning electron microscopy. [BBC News]

Those beads are called microspheres—they’re tiny glass balls about the size of red blood cells. The researchers apply these spheres to the surface of the object they want to see. In essence, the spheres capture light that normally would be lost before it ever reached the observer’s eye (those evanescent waves), enabling Li’s team to overcome the diffraction limits of microscope machinery that have limited the maximum possible resolution.

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From across the pond comes a ravishing collection of scientific imagery. The Wellcome Collection, a London museum, has just announced the winners of its Wellcome Image Awards.

The 21 award winners, selected from images acquired by the Wellcome Collection over the last 18 months, were chosen both for their ability to enhance scientific understanding and for their aesthetic appeal. Many use colour to better illustrate hard-to-see features. [New Scientist]

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As BP’s oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico week after week last summer, we got accustomed to wildly different estimates for how quickly the oil was leaking and how much entered the gulf. Now, 10 months after the mess began, government and independent scientists have wildly different estimates for how much of the oil remains.

Oceanographer Samantha Joye, speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington this weekend, revealed the findings of her trips to the Gulf to study the seafloor. In December she dove to areas around the site of BP’s well blowout, finding—and photographing—layers of gunky hydrocarbons. The oil was up to inches thick in places.

“Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don’t know,” Joye said, later adding: “there’s a lot of it out there.” [AP]

To explain how so much oil got down to the seafloor, Joye’s team did an experiment when they got back to the lab. Joye put a dab of oil from the BP well into a vial of water taken from nearby in the Gulf, then watched.

After just one day, naturally occurring microbes in the water began growing on the oil. After a week, the cells formed blobs, held together by spit, that were so heavy they began sinking to the bottom of a jar. Two weeks later, large streamers of microbial slime and cells were evident. Brown dots visible inside the mix were emulsified oil. “This is the mechanism that we propose deposited oil to the [Gulf’s] bottom,” Joye said. [Science News]

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The bacterium called Neisseria gonorrhoeae is what gives humans the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea. And it also takes something: human DNA. Northwestern University researchers report in the journal mBio that they’ve found pieces of human DNA in samples of the bacteria.

Gonorrhea is one of very few diseases exclusive to our species, and is one of the oldest recorded diseases in human history. An ancient disease that resembles gonorrhea’s symptoms is even described in the Bible, according to Hank Seifert, senior author of a paper on the gene transfer. [Popular Science]

Seifert and colleague Mark Anderson looked at 14 different samples of N. gonorrhoeae. Three of them possessed the chunk of human DNA. And they only saw it in the gonorrhea bacteria:

The pair looked for the same human DNA fragment in the genetically related bacterium Neisseria menigitidis, known to cause meningitis. “We screened many isolates and it wasn’t present,” says Seifert. That means the transfer to N. gonorrhoeae must have occurred since the two bacterial species diverged around 200,000 years ago. [New Scientist]

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Humans farm. So do ants and termites. But amoebas?

Indeed they do, say scientists who have studied a kind of amoeba that might be the world’s tiniest farmer. From Ed Yong:

The amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, is also known as a slime mould, but scientists who work with it sometimes use the more affectionate name of Dicty. Dicty spends most of its time as a single cell, oozing through the undergrowth in search of bacteria to eat. When they run out of prey, the amoebas unite to form a many-celled mobile slug. When the slug finds a good spot, it stretches upwards to form a ball at the end of a stalk. The ball is loaded with spores, which eventually blow free on the wind. When they land, they hatch into new amoebae and the life cycle begins again.

Scientists pieced together Dicty’s life cycle decades ago, but it still carries surprises. Debra Brock from Rice University captured 35 wild amoebas from Virginia and Minnesota and found that a third of them carried bacteria in their slugs and spores. The bacteria hail from a number of different species, and half of these are found on Dicty’s menu. When the spores land in new locations, their bacterial cargo start to multiply, which provides the amoebae with food.

Dicty doesn’t need to farm the way we do with our fertilizers and crops. It simply totes along its bacteria and lets them grow upon reaching a new destination. And by doing this, the bacteria-carrying amoebas fared better than their counterparts when Brock placed them in a sterile environment to simulate sterile soil.

For plenty more about Dicty, check out Ed’s full post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Oil wasn’t the only thing seeping into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The explosion of BP’s oil rig also triggered a leak a methane.

From Ed Yong:

With the well unsealed, substantial amounts of the gas were released into the gulf. This plume of dissolved methane should have lurked in the water for years, hanging around like a massive planetary fart. But by August, it had disappeared. On three separate trips through the gulf, John Kessler from Texas A&M University couldn’t find any traces of the gas above background levels. He thinks he knows why – the methane was eaten by bacteria.

The gas pouring out of the broken well spurred the growth of bacteria called methanotrophs, which can break down methane as their only source of energy. They made short work of the gas. By the time that Kessler reached the gulf, just four months after the initial blowout, he found plenty of bacteria and precious little methane.

Check out the rest of Ed’s post on this discovery at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

As for BP itself: The petroleum giant now finds itself in the legal arena, but the company may avoid a worst-case scenario there. A presidential commission established to investigate the affair has found the brunt of liability to be BP’s, but also found the root cause of the disaster to be widespread, systematic mismanagement by everyone, and not rogue behavior by any one player. That is, BP will skate without being charged with “gross negligence” because everybody else made mistakes, too.

Commission co-chair William K Reilly said: “So a key question posed from the outset by this tragedy is, do we have a single company, BP, that blundered with fatal consequences, or a more pervasive problem of a complacent industry? Given the documented failings of both Transocean and Halliburton, both of which serve the offshore industry in virtually every ocean, I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem.” [The Guardian]

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A particular set of rock paintings dating from more than 40,000 years ago don’t seem to be made of paint anymore. According to a new study published in the journal Antiquity, the vibrant artworks were long ago colonized by colorful microbes, which serve as “living pigments” in the paintings. Lead researcher Jack Pettigrew, of the University of Queensland in Australia, explains:

“‘Living pigments’ is a metaphorical device to refer to the fact that the pigments of the original paint have been replaced by pigmented micro-organisms…. These organisms are alive and could have replenished themselves over endless millennia to explain the freshness of the paintings’ appearance.” [BBC News]

When the researchers analyzed the so-called Bradshaw rock artworks found in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, they didn’t find paint. Instead they found a black fungus, probably belonging to a fungi group known as Chaetothyriales, as well as a reddish organism that is suspected to be a species of cyanobacteria.

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The name Titanic means so many things: the gigantic, disastrous ship; a record-breaking and award-winning movie; and now, a new iron-eating bacterium found in the boat’s underwater grave. Says maritime historian Dan Conlin:

“What is fascinating to me is that we tend to have this idea that these wrecks are time capsules frozen in time, when in fact there [are] all kinds of complex ecosystems feeding off them, even at the bottom of that great dark ocean.” [Our Amazing Planet]

The new species of bacteria, named Halomonas titanicae, is described in this month’s International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Biology. The bacteria is slowing eating away at the 50,000 tons of iron in the wreck, which has been under the ocean for 98 years. H. titanicae appears to digest iron and turns it into knobs of corrosion products.

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First came the extraterrestrial speculation. Then came the actual answer. Then came the backlash.

NASA’s big astrobiology news last week had nothing to do with E.T., of course—the team behind a study in Science announced the find of a kind of bacteria that appear to thrive in arsenic and can even use it in place of phosphorus in the backbone of its DNA double helix. But after the big announcement finally happened and squelched the more imaginative rumors, scientists started asking some hard questions about the study online.

Over at Slate, DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer rounded up expert critiques from biologists, and many didn’t hold back.

Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. “It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado. [Slate]

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Around two million people die each year from TB, and the bacterial infection is startlingly widespread—the World Health Organization says about one in three people around the world carry Mycobacterium tuberculosis (and humans may have been carrying it around for at least 9,000 years). Thankfully, TB is latent in the vast majority of these cases. But tuberculosis’ pervasiveness presents the question of just how the bacteria evades our immune system to set up shop on a long-term basis.

According to a study led by Gobardhan Das in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stem cells might be the answer. Particularly, mesenchymal stem cells (MSC).

TB recruits mesenchymal stem cells to the lungs, where they help suppress the immune system that fights disease… The stem cells produce nitric oxide, a chemical that reduces the type of white blood cells called T-cells, the researchers wrote. [Bloomberg]

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The science world is abuzz with news of a strange new life form found in California’s Mono Lake: Researchers report that they’ve discovered a bacterium that can not only thrive in an arsenic-rich environment, it can actually use that arsenic to build its DNA. If the researchers, who published their findings in Science, are correct, then they’ve found a form of life unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

As you might expect, DISCOVER’s blogs offered plenty of coverage of this exciting news.

At The Loom, Carl Zimmer writes: “Scientists have found a form of life that they claim bends the rules for life as we know it. But they didn’t need to go to another planet to find it. They just had to go to California.”

At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait explains exactly how the bacteria can make use of arsenic to build their DNA. A few days ago, Phil also took NASA to task for its press release promising news of “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life,” which fueled wild speculation on whether NASA had found little green men in the solar system.

At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong debunks a few of the more breathless accounts. The bacteria do not “belong to a second branch of life on Earth…. They aren’t a parallel branch of life; they’re very much part of the same tree that the rest of us belong to. That doesn’t, however, make them any less extraordinary.”

At Gene Expression, Razib Khan has more thoughts on the wild speculation that preceded the announcement–which he compares to the hype surrounding the unveiling of the Segway.

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At this point, after finding microorganisms that don’t mind extreme temperatures, pressure, aridity and other hardships, we shouldn’t be surprised that bacteria‘s dominion over the Earth extends to just about anywhere we look. A new expedition to the Earth’s crust has reached unprecedented depths—down to the deepest layer of the crust—and found that even there, microorganisms are tough enough to survive.

On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer before, but as the basalt is difficult to pierce it happens rarely. [New Scientist]

To circumvent the Herculean task of drilling through basalt, the expedition, called the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme, headed out to sea to find an easier drilling location.

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program sank its drill into the Atlantis Massif (seen above) in the central Atlantic Ocean where seismic forces have pushed the deep layer, known as the gabbroic layer, to within 230 feet of the ocean floor making it easier to reach. [UPI]

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