For millennia, people have hitched beasts to plows to exploit the animals’ strength and energy. In a modern variant of that practice, scientists have chemically harnessed bacteria to a micromotor so that they can make the device’s rotor slowly turn.
Tagbacteria
Wired News reports:
A 16-year-old high school student has invented a new way of producing electricity by harnessing the brawny power of bacteria.
Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.
Apparently a hoax: Zombie Outbreak in Cambodia (can’t find this in the bbc archives or any other reference to it on google news… and it just sounds crazy)
(via Hyperstition).
Apparently real: It rained shrimp in California saw something about this on the Cabal yesterday, found this story on Google News.
And an old link from Slashdot: Bacteria programmed to act like computer.
More useful bacteria communication:
Electrodes have been used to trap, interrogate and release individual bacteria in a bio-electronic circuit that could be used to construct nanoscale machines.
“One of the great challenges of nanotechnology remains the assembly of nanoscale objects into more complex systems,” says Robert Hamers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We think that bacteria and other small biological systems can be used as templates for fabricating even more complex systems.”
Link.
It’s true:
Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells.
Wired: People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid
(via Dr Hyatt)
A team at University of California, Los Angeles has found a way to communicate with bacteria through chemical signals.
Liao’s team persuaded the cells to make GFP simply as a convenient way to show that the acetate trigger was working. But in principle, they could use the acetate signal to trigger cells to do something more practical, such as making hydrogen or producing poisons to kill off diseased cells.
“You could use this approach as a Trojan horse idea to combat disease,” says Jeff Hasty, who works on gene modules at the University of California, San Diego. Modified cells of pathogenic bacteria could be introduced into a natural colony of the same cells, he says. Then, at a given chemical signal, the modified cells could be told to produce compounds that would kill off the bacteria.
Full Story: Nature:
(via Smart Mobs)
Interesting piece from the BBC:
The UN University says “extremophiles”, creatures adapted to life in the polar wastes, are being relentlessly hunted in what is virtually a new gold rush.
BBC: Antarctica’s resources ‘at risk’
(via Boing Boing)
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