Comments on: The clouds are alive! My new podcast on aerobiology

By: Guns, Bacteria, and Uranium (and other topics) « blueollie

Guns, Bacteria, and Uranium (and other topics) « blueollie — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:40:27 +0000

[...] Science What do biology and clouds have to do with each other? I came to this topic from the April 2012 issue of Discover Magazine; this was a Douglas Fox article “The Clouds are Alive”. Roughly speaking: there are microbes in the clouds and there is an interesting conjecture (with evidence behind it) that the microbes form the critical “framework” for which rain can develop; formerly it was thought that was mostly soot and dust particles. The interesting thing: evolution comes into play here. For one, some of the microbes are very resistant to radiation; if these microbes only existed on earth there would be no reason for them to evolve this defense. Another place: when these microbes appear on frost that covers plants, they have a mechanism for attacking the plant and using it as fuel. Hence crop-killing frosts don’t just kill via the thermal stress! Hence, anti-bacteria coatings on plants sometimes limit…frost damage! More here (podcast). [...]

By: Dr. N.K. Udaya Prakash

Dr. N.K. Udaya Prakash — Tue, 10 May 2011 04:22:24 +0000

I am an aerobiologist who never thought that the organism may reproduce in the atmosphere. I thought that the air may be functioning just as a career of organisms and the organisms are metabolic in air. My ideas never ventured into that, the organism may reproduce in the atmosphere. After going through the review, I need to accept that they have high potency to reproduce when they are abound in the atmosphere. Thanks for the discussion and review you done.

Dr. N.K. Udaya Prakash
Associate Professor
Veltech Technical University
Avadi, Chennai 600 062

By: Bob Carlson

Bob Carlson — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:47:31 +0000

i’m still holding out hope for H.P. Lovecraft’s intelligent interstellar gas clouds.

By: Douglas Watts

Douglas Watts — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:45:53 +0000

I like the part about “hospitals in the U.S. do not have windows you can open.”

By: Gail

Gail — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:54:05 +0000

Glick may have started it for insects, but there is active research featured in Isard & Gage’s “Flow of Life in the Atmosphere” http://msupress.msu.edu/bookTemplate.php?bookID=15.

By: Stan

Stan — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:06:36 +0000

Fascinating discussion. It's a pity this remains such a relatively neglected area of research – there must be all sorts of microscopic wonders miles overhead waiting to be discovered. It was Lyall Watson's Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984) that introduced me to the idea of a vast and little known microscopic aerobiology; the book includes a chapter called 'The Biology of Wind': 'Aerobiology is still in its infancy, but already we have enough hints to suggest that we are dealing at high altitude not only with accidental intrusions carried there passively by freak conditions, but with an ecology adapted to the edges of space as a normal habitat. One third of all bacteria collected in the upper air are able to withstand exposure for 48 hours to temperatures as low as -26º Centigrade.' The datum points to a paper by Proctor & Parker, 'Micro-Organisms in the Upper Air', in Moulton (ed.) Aerobiology, American Association for the Advancement of Science Publication no.17, 1942. Watson being Watson, he digs up a pertinent line of thinking by Lucretius, regarding the origin and dispersal of pestilence ('baleful particles'). Something else that might interest you, though it relates to bigger airborne critters than microbes: a photo of entomologist Perry Glick on the wing of a biplane with what appears to be one of the screen traps he used to collect insects. 33,934 of them, supposedly, in 1119 hours of open traps.