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A spore is a bacterium's survival capsule: dried almost solid and wrapped in protein armor, with its chemical processes shut down. Bacteria enter this state of hibernation when environmental conditions are unfavorable. What's ...
Black pod disease destroys up to a quarter of the world's cacao every year, roughly 700,000 metric tons worth more than $2 billion. The water mold responsible across the Americas is Phytophthora palmivora, and in Colombia ...
Microbial cell factories that produce pharmaceutical ingredients and other useful compounds include both the bacterium Escherichia coli and yeast, the organism used to leaven bread and ferment alcohol. The two organisms turn ...
The women I return to most—Elizabeth I, her potential heir Arbella Stuart (and rival to James Charles Stuart, later King James I), Virginia Woolf, Katharine Hepburn, Debbie Harry—never had children. Their reasons were wildly ...
RNA vaccines and other nucleic acid therapeutics are typically packaged within fatty molecules known as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). MIT researchers have now developed a way to produce these particles much more quickly and ...
In 2001, I had an epiphany while making my first trip to Australia. Walking across a remote sheep station in the dusty west, my ears were suddenly filled with the rich, spirited song of three pied butcherbirds.
Every cell in an organism contains the same DNA, which carries all the instructions needed for it to function. Yet cells do not all use the same genes: A nerve cell, for example, does not activate the same genes as a muscle ...
Most invasive species are introduced into the areas where they become damaging. That's part of why they tend to be so successful in taking over new environments and causing billions of dollars in damage.
Farmers used to sniff their soil to gauge how healthy it was. According to ecologist Rosa Boone, you can deduce a great deal from its smell: "The fungi and bacteria present in the soil are important for soil health and are ...
Chemosynthetic bacteria have been documented in various marine environments and in association with invertebrate hosts such as annelid worms and mollusks, but their presence in fish appears to be a new discovery. The findings ...
