Tag Archives: bacteria

Permian-Triassic climate lesson: Don’t even try to adapt to a mass extinction, mitigate – a single plague can kill a planet!

The second part of the new IPCC report, about the impacts of climate change, has been released on Monday. Across the globe dutiful journalists filled the headlines of their newspapers – and as they presume most of their readers are … Continue reading →

Ticks in Switzerland transmit new bacterial disease to humans

Until now, we knew that ticks primarily transmit two pathogens to humans in Switzerland: the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi – which causes borreliosis – and the early-summer-meningoencephalitis virus, which can cause cerebral inflammation.

Now, microbiologists from the University of Zurich confirm the existence of another tick disease in Switzerland – neoehrlichiosis.

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Extremophile bacteria found living on South American volcanoes

South American volcano in Atacama regionResearchers who were looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth have found a hardy few. A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi, and other rudimentary organisms, called archaea, which seem to have a different way of converting energy than their cousins elsewhere in the world.

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Bee honey naturally rich in lactic acid bacteria, perhaps our first probiotic food – CCD implications?

The stomachs of wild honey bees are full of healthy lactic acid bacteria that can fight bacterial infections in both bees and humans.

A collaboration between researchers at three universities in Sweden – Lund University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Karolinska Institutet – has produced findings that could be a step towards solving the problems of both bee deaths and antibiotic resistance.

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New methods for better purification of wastewater

Before wastewater reaches recipient waters, nutrients must be removed in order to avoid eutrophication and large algal blooms, which may result in serious damage to animal and plant life. Robert Almstrand at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has shown in his thesis that better removal of nitrogen from wastewater can be achieved by providing the bacteria that purify the water with alternating high and low levels of nutrients.

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No evidence bacteria ate methane at end of Snowball Earth

Same story as yesterday, but now 635 million years earlier. This time again no evidence can be found that it were microbes that ate climate-disrupting amounts of methane, at the end of the Marinoan ice age, better known as ‘Snowball … Continue reading →