Water has molded our planet into what it is today, in ways you may not have imagined! #water #waterislife
What should farmers do to deal with disappearing water? Add fungi to the soil! This recent study sheds light on the use of mycorrhizae to mitigate drought in the farming industry, which is facing increasingly intense water shortages every year.
Scientists study organic material from the Chicxulub crater to identify the microbes that lived within it, to understand what happened to the Earth when that giant asteroid killed all the dinosaurs.
Researchers found that minerals from rocks deposited in karst aquifers during storms comes in two waves.
Microbes on Earth have adapted to survive in some pretty extreme locations. The extreme dryness of deserts, high salinity in salt deposits, cold temperatures of glaciers, and even high pressures of the deep ocean don’t stop some life forms. Another extreme environment is created by a rock known as serpentinite. This…
Researchers found a hidden selenium cycle tied to manganese oxide minerals made by common soil fungi.
In a paper published in Nature last month, researchers found that there is a greater risk of landslides after earthquakes, especially following rainstorms.
Sort of like a fossilized microbial lasagna, fossils called “stromatolites” are formed when layered communities of different types of bacteria trap sand, dirt, and debris in their structure over time. Stromatolites are found in rocks as old as 3.5 billion years, and containing the planet’s earliest life forms.
Many organisms live by breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide, and those that don’t often live by taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. However, did you know that these aren’t the only ways life can survive? Researchers recently discovered Sulfurimonas marinigri, a species of bacteria that…
Have you ever driven past an old factory building and wondered what ever happened to the harsh chemicals that were used there? If you guessed that a lot of the chemicals ended up in the environment, you would be right. Many of these pollutants are what we refer to as “halogenated hydrocarbons”. These are molecules…