As the Mars Rover sets out to look for evidence of life on another planet, scientists back on Earth suggest viruses played a key role in creating stromatolites, our planet's earliest lifeforms.
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 19, 2021
2
677
A research team including the geobiologist Dr. Helge Missbach from the University of Cologne has detected organic molecules and gases trapped in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks. A widely accepted hypothesis says that the earliest ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 19, 2021
0
9
Chemical clues left behind by humble microbes have rewritten the timeline of one of the biggest mass extinction events in Earth's history.
Earth Sciences
Nov 18, 2020
0
4
Curtin University research has shed new light on when one of the largest mass extinction events on Earth occurred, which gives new meaning to what killed Triassic life and allowed the ecological expansion of dinosaurs in ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 16, 2020
11
2645
In microbial mats, communities of microorganisms live among viruses that infect them. But what trends govern those virus-host interactions? Do generalist viruses run rampant, capable of infecting different host species? Or, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 09, 2020
0
54
When you're only one of trillions, it can be hard to get ahead. That's the problem faced by aquatic bacterium Leptothrix cholodnii, which is often found in the slime-like microbial mats common to mineral-rich bodies of water. ...
Bio & Medicine
Dec 16, 2019
0
8
Despite bearing witness to its own increase in Earth's atmosphere by around 2.5 to 2.3 billion years ago, oxygen has had relatively little to say about its own early history until now. A recent EU-funded study provides a ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 01, 2019
0
20
In a suspension of disbelief, the countless readers who have picked up J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books have readily accepted that Ents, the ancient treelike creatures of the fictional Fangorn forest, walk, talk and ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 18, 2019
0
50
Montana State University scientists have found a new lineage of microbes living in Yellowstone National Park's thermal features that sheds light on the origin of life, the evolution of archaeal life and the importance of ...
Cell & Microbiology
May 15, 2018
3
1007
Take a good look at these photos: They show you 1.6 billion years old fossilized oxygen bubbles, created by tiny microbes in what was once a shallow sea somewhere on young Earth.
Earth Sciences
Mar 02, 2018
4
940
