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| BUGS GO SPELUNKING |
| Some of the world's largest and most spectacular caves were created by the tiniest builders imaginable, according to a team of US geologists. |
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| BUGS GROW GOLD THAT LOOKS LIKE CORAL |
| Microbes that grow gold grains looking like a coral reef could open up new possibilities for mineral prospecting, according to an Australian researcher. |
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| SPERM RELY ON CELL-DEATH TRIGGER |
| Molecules that tell cells to suicide also play a key role in the creation of sperm according to U.S. research on fruit flies. |
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| CANCER DIAGNOSED IN 70 MILLION-YEAR-OLD |
| The first discovery of a brain tumour in a dinosaur has revealed that they are indistinguishable from human tumours, suggesting the global disease has barely changed over 70 million years. |
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| OCEAN PLANT LIFE SLOWS DOWN AND ABSORBS LESS CARBON |
| Plant life in the world's oceans has become less productive since the early 1980s, absorbing less carbon, which may in turn impact the Earth's carbon cycle, according to a study that combines NASA satellite data with NOAA surface observations of marine plants. |
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| SOME VIRUSES FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET |
| Some viruses use violent force to explosively inject their genes into prey, exerting pent-up pressure greater than that of a powerful airgun, an American-French study has found. |
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| BACTERIA START UNDERGROUND FIRES IN MALI |
| Patches of mysterious shoe-melting, foot-roasting hot ground in parts of West Africa may have been caused by bacteria, not volcanic activity as has been thought for decades. |
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| BIZARRE PARASITE BUG JOINS WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES |
| A new player has emerged in the war of the sexes: a bizarre 'ultra-selfish' bacterial parasite that hijacks animal reproduction to promote their own existence by favouring female hosts over males, according to a British report. |
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| CANNIBAL BACTERIA EAT THEIR BROTHERS AND SISTERS |
| Some bacteria ensure their survival during famine by killing their siblings and eating them in order to avoid hibernating, an American-Spanish team has found. |
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| THREE NEW KINGDOMS OF LIFE DISCOVERED IN ALPINE REGION |
| Four complete new kingdoms of life have been discovered by American researchers in the high alpine environment of Colorado, rewriting the textbooks on microbes. |
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| RESEARCH FINDS LIFE 1000 FEET BENEATH OCEAN FLOOR |
| A new study has discovered an abundance of microbial life deep beneath the ocean floor in ancient basalt that forms part of the Earth's crust, in research that once more expands the realm of seemingly hostile or remote environments in which living organisms can apparently thrive. |
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| MICROORGANISM ISOLATED IN SPACE |
| How far up into the sky does the biosphere extend? Do microorganisms exist at heights of 40 km and in what quantity? To answer these questions several research institutes in India collaborated on a path-breaking project to send balloon-borne sterile "cryosamplers" into the stratosphere. The programme was led by cosmologist Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, with scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Studies contributing their various expertise. |
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| PHYTOPLANKTON IMPLICATED IN GLOBAL WARMING |
| The ubiquitous one-celled ocean organisms, phytoplankton, play a significant and previously unknown role in warming the planet by capturing and absorbing the Sun's radiation, American researchers have found. |
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| ION CHANNELS ALLOW BACTERIA TO RESIST STOMACH ACID |
| Researchers have found that a primitive type of ion channel similar to those found in mammalian nerve cells helps bacteria resist the blast of acid they encounter in the stomach of their hosts. |
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| SCIENTISTS DECIPHER GENETIC CODE OF MALARIA PARASITE |
| In a landmark contribution to the age-old battle against malaria, a consortium of scientists including The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) announced today that they have deciphered the complex genetic code of the parasite that causes the deadliest form of the disease. Malaria is one of the world's most devastating infectious diseases, killing more than a million people a year in developing nations. |
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| DNA’S OSCILLATING DOUBLE HELIX HINDERS ELECTRICAL CONDUCTION |
| DNA has an oscillating double-helix structure. This oscillating means that the DNA molecules conduct electricity much less well than was previously thought. Ultrafast cameras were one of the devices the researchers from Amsterdam used to demonstrate this. |
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| TINY BUGS IN MEALYBUGS HAVE SMALLER BUGS INSIDE THEM |
| Like tiny Russian dolls, the mealybugs that infest your houseplants carry bacteria inside their cells that are themselves infected with another type of bacteria. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, shows that instead of spreading from bug to bug, the second set of bacteria infected the first several times in the past and are now being passed along and evolving with them. |
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| SATELLITES SEE BIG CHANGES SINCE 1980S IN KEY ELEMENT OF OCEAN'S FOOD CHAIN |
| Since the early 1980s, ocean phytoplankton concentrations that drive the marine food chain have declined substantially in many areas of open water in Northern oceans, according to a comparison of two datasets taken from satellites. At the same time, phytoplankton levels in open water areas near the equator have increased significantly. Since phytoplankton are especially concentrated in the North, the study found an overall annual decrease in phytoplankton globally. |
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| ALL ABOARD THE SPERM 'TRAIN' |
| Researchers in the UK, Australia and the Czech Republic have observed that in wood mice, sperm join together to speed their route to the egg.
Sperm 'trains' of hundreds of thousands of individuals start forming just after ejaculation, report the scientists in Nature. The sperm link together using a hook on their heads, or by grabbing the tail of the sperm in front. |
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| NEW CELLULAR EVOLUTION THEORY REJECTS DARWINIAN ASSUMPTIONS |
| Life did not begin with one primordial cell. Instead, there were initially at least three simple types of loosely constructed cellular organizations. They swam in a pool of genes, evolving in a communal way that aided one another in bootstrapping into the three distinct types of cells by sharing their evolutionary inventions. |
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| MICROBIOLOGY TEAM PROBES BACTERIUM'S SURPRISING SURVIVAL TACTICS |
| A team of microbiologists affiliated with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass) has uncovered the unusual survival strategies used by a common bacterium. The finding could have implications in cleaning up contaminants ranging from petroleum to uranium. |
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| UCLA SCIENTISTS, COLLEAGUES SUBSTANTIATE BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF EARLIEST FOSSILS |
| UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf and colleagues have substantiated the biological origin of the earliest known cellular fossils, which are 3.5 billion years old. The research is published in the March 7 issue of the journal Nature. |
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| THE NEW BIOLOGY OF ROCKS: 'ARE THERE MEDICAL IMPLICATIONS OF GEOMICROBIOLOGY?' |
| If microbial life is found on Mars, will it be native to the planet or something carried there from Earth? Either way, will it be safe to return samples of such organisms to Earth? Astrobiology, the search for life elsewhere, says a University of Illinois microbiologist, is making us look a lot closer at microbial life on Earth – how it adapts and its relationship to emerging infectious diseases. |
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| COMMON MICROBES SURVIVE PRESSURES EQUAL TO THOSE FOUND AT 50 KILOMETERS INSIDE THE EARTH’S CRUST |
| Until now, scientists thought that only specially adapted organisms they call extremophiles could exist in seemingly intolerable environments such as high-pressure, high-temperature oceanic hydrothermal vents or in the ice sheets of Antarctica. A study published in the February 22, 2002, issue of Science, however, shows that even common bacteria are viable under high-pressure conditions equivalent to about 50 kilometers beneath the Earth’s crust or 160 kilometers in a hypothetical sea. |
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| ROCK-EATING MICROBES SURVIVE IN DEEP OCEAN OFF PERU |
| Way down deep in the ocean off the coast of Peru, in the rocks that form the sea floor, live bacteria that don't need sunlight, don't need carbon dioxide, don't need oxygen. These microbes subsist by eating the very rocks they call home. |
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| ANTARCTIC MICROBES COULD LIVE ON MARS |
| New Zealand and Canadian scientists have uncovered microbes in Antarctica that live in hostile conditions mirroring those on Mars.
The scientists discovered long-lived colonies of insecticidal fungi and a common species of Penicillium bacteria at two sites in Antarctica's Dry Valleys - so-called because they are ice-free - living three to eight centimetres beneath the surface. |
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| MORE EVIDENCE FOR 'NANOBES' |
| An Australian researcher may have quietly strengthened the evidence for extra-terrestrial life last week at — of all things — a micro-electronics conference.
Dr Philippa Uwins of the University of Queensland announced at a conference in Adelaide on Monday that she had confirmed the presence of DNA in tiny nanoscale structures believed to be the smallest autonomous living organisms on Earth, called 'nanobes'. |
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| PRIMITIVE MICROBE OFFERS MODEL FOR EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS |
| A microorganism whose evolutionary roots can be traced to the era of the first multicellular animals may provide a glimpse of how single-celled organisms made a critical evolutionary leap. |
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| GROWING WIRES IN WATER |
| US researchers have discovered a new way to grow microscopic electrical wires in water, and soon hope to be plugging into living cells. |
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| TYPHOID FEVER BUG SEQUENCE RAISES HOPE OF COMPLETE ERADICATION |
| Scientists from Britain, Denmark and Vietnam have deciphered the genetic code of the bacterium responsible for typhoid fever, Salmonella typhi.
Their achievement, reported in the magazine Nature 23.10.01., raises hope for the prospects of completely eradicating typhoid, which currently claims 600,000 lives a year globally. |
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| NU PROFESSOR WORKS TOWARD A PERMANENTLY GERM-FREE SURFACE: POLYMER GLASS COATING CAPABLE OF KILLING AIRBORNE BACTERIA ON CONTACT |
| Whose hands were on that doorknob before yours? That handrail, pay phone, or subway pole? Kim Lewis, newly appointed professor of biology at Northeastern University in Boston, has worked with scientists at M.I.T. and Tufts University to ease our germ-fearing minds about this very thing. In their research, they demonstrate that covalent attachment of N-alkylated poly(4-vinylpyridine) (PVP) to glass surfaces can make surfaces permanently lethal to several types of bacteria on contact. |
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| COMPLEX MOLECULE FOUND IN SPACE |
| The compound vinyl alcohol has been found in space, raising hopes of clues to the origin of complex organic molecules. The molecule was found in an interstellar cloud of dust and gas near the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy by radio astronomers using the National Science Foundation's 12 Meter Telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona. |
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| BACTERIAL COMMUNITIES FOUND TO FOLLOW WATER |
| Miraculous things happen to the desert when it rains - everything changes from brown to green and organisms that have not been seen for months make a brief .emergence from underground lairs. |
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| HOW BACTERIA HARDEN THEIR ‘ARMOR’ |
| Duke biochemists have identified a key chemical reaction by which some important virulent bacteria alter their outer coat to make it antibiotic-resistant. The scientists say that their finding could lead to drugs to block such protective alteration, preventing bacteria from developing resistance. |
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| LASER TECHNIQUE EXAMINES MOVEMENT IN NUCLEUS OF LIVING CELL |
| By colliding two laser beams head-on, scientists at the University of Illinois can measure the movement of chromatin (tiny packets of DNA) in the nucleus of a living cell. |
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| SCIENTISTS IDENTIFY METHANE-CONSUMING MICROBES FROM OCEAN DEPTHS |
| California-Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) microbiologists report in the 20 July 2001 issue of the journal Science on new techniques that combine the identification of microorganisms with their biogeochemical activity. In the study, the researchers used the new approach to identify marine microbes that consume methane, an important greenhouse gas. |
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| ALL RBS ARE NOT ALIKE: INSIGHT INTO RB IN THE PLANT CELL CYCLE |
| By identifying and functionally characterizing an RB homolog in a simple green algae, scientists have shed a surprising new light on the potential role of RB-like proteins in the plant cell cycle. |
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| SCIENTISTS DESCRIBE VARIATION IN OCEANIC BACTERIAL PHOTOPIGMENTS THAT CONVERT LIGHT INTO BIOCHEMICAL ENERGY |
| Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) microbiologists report in the 14 June 2001 issue of the journal Nature the discovery of the widespread occurrence and depth-specific adaptation of a new energy-generating, light-absorbing pigment, proteorhodopsin. Last fall in the journal Science, MBARI researchers described the discovery of the first marine bacterium with this photopigment that can generate cellular energy using light; however, the function of those microbes in the ocean environment remained a mystery. |
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| LIVING IN CLOUDS |
| Bacteria which are likely to change climate on the planet, have been hound in the upper layers of the atmosphere. The area where they were found is featured with severe ambient conditions: low temperatures (down to -40° C), intensive ultraviolet radiation, insignificant air pressure, a lack of oxygen. Scientists couldn’t even imagine that any life forms existed over there. |
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