You can squash small bugs by stepping on them, but can you crush even tinier microorganisms like viruses and bacteria? It turns out that you’d need to apply a lot of pressure.
Terminus of the Recherchebreen glacier in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, about 760 miles from the North Pole.
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To fully understand the extent of climate-related dangers the Arctic – and our planet – is facing, we must focus on organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye.
Antimicrobial resistance is now a leading cause of death worldwide due to drug-resistant infections, including drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, pneumonia and Staph infections like the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus shown here.
(NIAID, cropped from original)
Drug-resistant microbes are a serious threat for future pandemics, but the new draft of the WHO’s international pandemic agreement may not include provisions for antimicrobial resistance.
Food-borne illnesses usually present as diarrhoea, vomiting and stomach pains.
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Ancient microbes likely produced natural products their descendants today do not. Tapping into this lost chemical diversity could offer a potential source of new drugs.
Using your phone when you’re on the toilet is a horrid habit.
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Fossil evidence of how the earliest life on Earth came to be is hard to come by. But scientists have come up with a few theories based on the microbes, viruses and prions existing today.
Turns out it is a sterile environment after all.
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Microbes are so tiny humans can’t see them without special equipment. But the discovery of 20 new species will help scientists map the evolutionary tree of life.
As a material, bacteria’s ability to rapidly multiply and adapt to different conditions is an asset.
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The walls of your house could someday be built with living bacteria. Synthetic biologists are engineering microbes into living materials that are cheap and sustainable.
The pumpkin on the right has a fungal disease known as black rot.
Matt Kasson
The types of microbes residing in your gut can affect your mental and physical health. Home microbiome tests promise to help consumers improve the composition of their gut microbes.
Without obvious signs of contamination like the mold in this jam, consumers use expiration dates to decide whether to keep or throw away food.
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