New Atlas

Environment Audio available

10-year study documents massive, mysterious ecosystem deep beneath our feet

Michael Irving December 10, 2018

A study has taken a census of life in the “deep biosphere” beneath the Earth's surface. Among the finds are bizarre creatures that can survive at record depths, pressures and temperatures, and even “zombie” bacteria that may live (in a loose sense of the word) for millions of years at a time.

Researchers have cataloged the extensive biosphere of life deep beneath the surface of the Earth

Biology

Synthetic organisms engineered to shed light on ancient evolution

Michael Irving October 30, 2018

To peer back in time at certain key steps of evolution, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute have engineered synthetic microorganisms designed to be similar to some that might have lived billions of years ago.

These synthetic microorganisms are made up of yeast cells (blue) with bacteria (pink) inside them, which ...

Medical

New antibiotics found in leafy bacterial battlegrounds

Michael Irving July 30, 2018

Researchers from ETH Zurich have found a way to make use of some of the chemical weapons bacteria have developed against each other. In this case, that bacterial battleground is on the surface of thale cress leaves.

This bustling bacterial metropolis is located on a leaf, and it might just help us discover ...

Biology

40,000-year old worms revived from Siberian permafrost

Michael Irving July 29, 2018

Two worms frozen in the Siberian permafrost for around 40,000 years have now been thawed and revived, making them the oldest living creatures on the planet and the first multicellular organisms to have survived such long-term cryobiosis.

Scientists have managed to revive worms (similar to the one pictured) that were frozen in the ...

Science

"World's oldest colors" found in billion-year old fossils

Michael Irving July 9, 2018

Scientists have uncovered what they’re calling the oldest colors on Earth. Dating back more than a billion years, the bright pink pigments are the remains of some of the earliest microscopic organisms that once inhabited an ancient ocean, and their discovery helps fill a gap in the fossil record.

A vial of the pink compounds, which at 1.1 billion years old, represent the oldest intact ...

Biology

Meet the microbe that breaks the "universal rule" of DNA

Michael Irving June 17, 2018

Living cells follow instructions encoded in DNA to construct organisms. It’s long been thought that one DNA sequence would always create the same protein, but now researchers have found the first exception to this “universal rule,” a microbe that chooses between two different translations each time.

Researchers have discovered a species of yeast that breaks a "universal rule" of DNA

Environment

Video: IBM's AI microscopes use plankton as living water sensors

Michael Irving April 19, 2018

With microplastics now in the deepest ocean trenches and moving up the food chain, it’s no surprise that plastic pollution is in the crosshairs for Earth Day 2018. IBM has now released a video outlining how it's helping clean up the seas, using plankton as a kind of living water quality sensor.

IBM Research scientists have developed a way to monitor the health and behavior of plankton, to ...

Science

Digitized worm brain learns a new trick

Michael Irving February 7, 2018

The human brain is a beast of a computer, but before we can emulate that we’ll need to start with something simpler. C. elegans is a worm whose basic brain of only 302 neurons has been digitized. Now researchers have taught this virtual worm a new trick, without writing a single line of code.

C. elegans is a worm whose simple brain has been digitized as a basic neural network, ...

Science

Diverse microfossils suggest extraterrestrial life should be widespread

Michael Irving December 18, 2017

Microscopic fossils found in Australia decades ago appeared to show evidence of life dating back almost 3.5 billion years, but have since been contested. New analysis shows that the microfossils are indeed biological, and the find may have implications for the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.

A sliver of 3.5 billion-year-old rock, being studied on the SIMS instrument

Energy

Light-bending algae boost organic solar cell efficiency

Michael Irving October 18, 2017

No matter how useful a certain human innovation is, nature has usually beaten us to it by millions of years and done a better job. A Yale team has looked to nature to help solve a design problem, using tiny fossilized creatures called diatoms to improve the light absorption of organic solar cells.

Yale researchers have used light-manipulating algae called diatoms to improve the efficiency of organic solar cells