Bacteria can travel thousands of miles through the air on their own | Hacker News Reader

Bacteria can travel thousands of miles through the air on their own

earth.com

73 pointsgscott21 comments

Link to the actual study (which the article never provides): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.009...

The evidence seems super speculative to me. Is there anything else to corroborate this?

Fine dust gets lofted high in the atmosphere. Some bacteria can handle being dried out for long periods and act as fine particles. As I recall, one of the victims of the anthrax terror attacks was a woman who lived several miles downwind of an affected Post Office.

But good for these researchers for working out the details, and I'm sure there's a lot more in the paper that didn't make it into the article.

Is one bacteria landing on your tongue, being sucked up your nose or inhaled into your lungs going to do anything? Are there any bacteria and virus that can kill with just one making contact?

It’s called “infectious dose”, and it’s largely about probabilities.

See this question that I asked a while ago (and associated answers) on Biology SE: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/5442/are-all-kno...

EDIT: added missing URL.

Apparently for Anthrax the LD1, the dose expected to kill 1% of the population exposed to it, is just 1 to 3 spores. So it's possisble that woman downwind of the post office might have just inhaled a single spore.

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/infectious-disease-topics/anthrax

As I understood it, Caribbean sand comes from the Sahara, and basically gets flown in as dust across the Atlantic.

Bacteria are a different beast as UV radiation kills them vary easily. The odds of surviving a single day at altitude is fairly low. Combined with a low probability of reaching that altitude, let alone coming into contact with an viable host after such a journey push this into extreme territory.

What about traveling at night? No UV then.

Wind is generally not fast enough to travel thousands of miles over 10ish hours.

Plenty of bacteria have survived going into LEO in recent decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_microorganisms_tested_...

Not the same thing. Those are generally protected from direct exposure to sunlight.

That said some bacteria are reasonably resistant to UV. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5483449/

As I understood these were actually bacteria that were observed to have survived being in space, as in on the external surface of satellites and shuttles, or extreme-like conditions. One problem related to detecting life on other planets is that a number of bacteria are suspected to be able to survive the whole trip to whichever planet or space object we send a probe to.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/bacteria...

That’s true, but not on all surfaces. The back side of solar panels for example don’t receive direct sunlight. But, even a bolt will provide plenty of shade for bacteria. Plenty of nooks and crannies to go around. Space qualified lubricants can even provide a growth medium.

Anyway, my original point was more in line with this. “Our results predict that most terrestrial bacteria would be inactivated within the first [day] on Mars if contaminated spacecraft surfaces receive direct sunlight.” And remember Mars gets far less sunlight than earth.

*on their own

I believe the title is grammatically correct.

Garner's Modern English Usage recommends the plural form, and cites a 7:1 current usage ratio in favor of plural.

Thats interesting. I did not know about that. Can you post the URL of the source?

Sadly, it's not online that I know of. Here are pictures of the text:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5sa0m8l9u6211y4/2019-03-26%2019.21... https://www.dropbox.com/s/dwbh9i7a4dcx84g/2019-03-26%2019.22...

The book [https://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-English-Usage-Garner/d...] is worth owning.

This is good stuff. Thanks for sharing. I will consider reading this book.

Although based on that book, with which I agree here, the plural seems unambiguously the preferred term for this article's context, I'm not convinced of the book's examples of incorrect use of the singular form. It seems like in the given examples, the word "bacteria" is treated as singular when referring to a specific strain of bacteria. It seems unwieldy in referring to one particular strain, IMHO, to say "the bacterium that causes <x>", since one typically gets infected by a vast quantity of the individual entities, not just one. Thus I think "the [strain of] bacteria that causes ..." [for one strain] sounds just as natural as "bacteria that cause <x> include <a>, <b>, <c> ..." [referring to multiple strains].

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