Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware | Hacker News Reader

Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware

phys.org

132 pointsdnetesn64 comments

'Oily' film on puddles can be caused by iron and manganese reacting bacteria: https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/microbes/intro.html

You can determine the origin by disturbing the film, if it 'shatters', it's bacterial.

love how the image is a gif that includes the border, the shadow and the margins, looks like this site has been running along for quite a while (also because of the center tag) and it's a testament to how simple, good engineering last for a long time.

I won’t dispute that it probably looks great on a proper monitor, but that site is painful to use on mobile. The width is fixed, which means that either the text us illegibly small, or I have to scroll side-to-side to see the entirety of each line as I read.

the site doesn't have any fixed width in the css and adding in a meta header identifying it as responsive, it works as it should.

arguably is the user agent assumption that every old site is broken without giving them a large virtual viewport with a small font that's giving an unwanted behavior.

I had a microbiologist friend who said: "If you can name something, there's a bacterium that will eat it".

Sounds like a fun HN comment game, let’s go:

Formaldehyde.

R. sphaeroides

https://news.wisc.edu/microbe-eats-formaldehyde/#:~:text=Ent....

Oh nice. Let’s kick it up a notch:

Chlorine Trifluoride.

Probably one of the chlorine-breathing microbes.

Of course, the hard part is discovering the exact microbe that eats a given compound and publishing/finding an exact paper on it, not naming compounds.

Which input sha256s into d4667a67e71436947c7ff89f31379aeb82d2044f74dbad776941fcd91585e318?3

I feel like the hardest part would be convincing Chlorine Trifluoride to exist long enough for something to eat it, this one may be unfair.

My last request for the night: Enriched Uranium.

Geobacter, Geothrix and Dyella species, as well as a novel—potentially predatory—Bacteroidetes species, and a new member of class Anaerolineae (Chloroflexi). Additionally, a population of methanogenic Methanocella species. [0]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29128951/

What happens to radiation when they eat it ? Does it go into excretions or does it get incorporated into the bacteria ? (or both ?)

Radiation is not a thing with an independent existence. Rather, when uranium decays, it emits radiation. (That radiation is in the form of some kind of particle, that particle of course does have an independent existence. I explain a bit more at the end.)

When the bacteria eat the uranium, what it's really doing is oxidizing it (burning it if you will), and the excreting it. That uranium oxide is then just sitting there.

It might then decay, and if it does it will emit the radiation. The process of being eating, and/or oxidized changes nothing whatsoever about the uranium decaying, it will do so, at a random, unpredictable time, and nothing you can do to it will speed that up or slow it down.

A bit more about radiation: When uranium decays it can emit various thing, those things are collectively called "radiation". Those things also exist on their own (created in other ways), and when they do they get a new name.

So radiation can be thought of as "the process of emitting something, while an atom decays", it's a process, not a thing in and of itself. i.e. since it's not a thing, it can't be incorporated into the bacteria in the way you are asking.

Most of the emitted radiation is traveling way too fast to be incorporated into the bacteria, it will travel until it crashes into something, damaging that thing in the process (that's what makes it dangerous).

Sometimes (it varies) the exact same particle, not traveling fast, can be useful and/or harmless.

Does that make sense? If not feel free to ask more.

Thanks, it was really clear (I think it can be filed with an eli5 tag).

I somehow thought that radioactive uranium being processed by a bacteria could alter its properties significantly and have a major positive effect on radiating materials.

Radiation is caused by the properties of the nucleus of the atom, and chemistry only affects the electrons orbiting the nucleus. In fact, the behavior of electrons governs every phenomena of nature that you could ever name with the exception of radiation and gravity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

> Which input sha256s into d4667a67e71436947c7ff89f31379aeb82d2044f74dbad776941fcd91585e318

you found me

How about: Hydrogen fluoride. I know there are acidophiles but a concentrated HF solution in water has a H0 of up to -11, surely no membrane (made of proteins) can survive that?

Dunno about HF specifically but there are bacteria living at extremely low pH in highly concentrated acids from mine runoff at Iron Mountain Mine.

Polyethylene.

They don't identify the bacterium in the article, but waxworm guts contain them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2020/03/09/mysterious-...

Pseudomonas bacteria can break down polyurethane, which is a tougher material than polyethylene: https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/03/28/scientists-find-ba...

[1} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_pseudofirmus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis

Aqua Rezia

I guess you meant Aqua Regia? Not at all well versed in biology, but that seems less of a challenge than the other materials proposed (heavy metals, etc).

Aqua Regia is a mixture of Nitric Acid and Hydrochloric Acid. At least the first seems easy enough to digest and obtain energy from.

Yes, it is very acidic (ph 0 - 1) but so is your stomache (ph 1.5 - 3.5) and plenty of bacteria survive in that.

Couldn't find a specific species on google though =)

Yep. misspelled it.

ph is a logarithmic scale so the difference between ph ~0 and ph 3 is of 3 orders of magnitude (or something like that. My maths is rubbish...). it can dissolve noble metals so I doubt anything living can survive it. But once diluted, some extremophiles may be live off it. while googling found this interesting article

https://onezero.medium.com/a-new-zealand-startup-is-using-mi...

so yeah, the challenge is halfway broken. science is amazing. :D

Thaumic radiation.

Trump

Not a biologist. far outside of my expertise. Random human, there must be a zillion. E. Coli? I suspect, but do not know, there are tons of human eating bacteria.

Pure fluorine.

Tangentially related, mealworms have been studied and found to be able to eat a diet including polystyrene with no ill effects.

neutrino

Black holes. Not a bacterium, but there aren’t a whole lot of options here.

Perfluorooctanoic acid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#PFOA

Cool! The manganese nodules part reminds me of gold excreting bacteria bacteria.

https://www.livescience.com/61804-bacteria-poops-gold.html

I still want to figure out how to make an artificial stomach that digests plastic and produces electricity. I just imagine building drones that eat the plastic in the ocean for fuel. Down to the microplastic too eg. mini whales ha.

I love unusual discoveries like this. Reminds me of watching the Star Trek TNG episode about silicon-based lifeforms as a kid and wishing real-life had more strange discoveries like that.

Was that the one that took over part of the ships systems, calling the crew "Ugly bags of mostly water"?

Glass sponges[1]kinda come close?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexactinellid

This reminded me of fungus that can feed on gamma radiation.

> Leadbetter found the bacteria serendipitously after performing unrelated experiments

"Leadbetter" is quite an appropriate name for the researcher. ;)

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism.

This reminds me of the different fungi that "eat oil spills":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23869741

And the research done by Paul Stamets (I think?)

EDIT: Why do you think that never took off?

>Why do you think that never took off?

Maybe takes a lot of time and no expensive contracts and kickbacks ;)

Can this affect our mouth and gut bacteria?

Probably, but possibly only under the right conditions.

Should drop bags of these extremeophiles onto the solar system's moons and planets.

Probably more likely we'll find extremophiles like these at those locations.

Also I think there's treaties stopping you from polluting other planets.

Is Earthly life pollution?

Yes it is if you put it on an extraterrestrial place. This is why space agencies do a thorough decontamination before sending satellites to other planets.

That will assure the extinction of Earthly life.

It’s the only way to tell if any life we find out there was native or just something we brought with us on the probe.

That's not exactly true as life unrelated to ours would be at least a little different, but it would help us if there is common origin - then that life would be very much alike ours and we would need to do a serious investigation about possible contamination.

Even if it's a common origin, millennia of random mutations will make it so very, very different from the descendants of terrestrial extremophiles.

Yeah, but some details are literally unchangeable, that's a part of how we know there was only single abiogenesis on Earth.

> It’s the only way to tell

It's inconceivable that extraterrestrial life would be indistinguishable from terrestrial.

It's also clear we've seen exactly zero signs of any sort of off-Earth life in the solar system. Nothing.

> It's inconceivable that extraterrestrial life would be indistinguishable from terrestrial.

NASA conceives of it, along with all 128 national governments who have signed (and in 104 cases ratified) the Outer Space Treaty.

It may be that Earth is the only place in Sol with life (I’m a software engineer not an exobiologist, so I don’t even have a ballpark estimate for either multiple abiogenesis events or panspermia between any two bodies), but the only way to have a good shot at knowing is to be over-cautious until the actual scientists have done their work.

And right now, those scientists are saying “sterilise the probes going to these places: ...”.

I'd like to hear the rationale of these scientists that extraterrestrial life could be indistinguishable from terrestrial.

For example, how many instances are there of two species evolving independently becoming indistinguishable? Zero.

> those scientists are saying

Scientists aren't immune to politics and irrational thinking.

Yes. We already have lots of problem with invasive species.

It really would be a shame if terrestrial life "invaded" lifeless rocks like Mars.

There are people with the best job title in the world, devoted to stopping that kind of thing:

Planetary Protection Officers.

Do we have an Earth one? We should.

I find it impossible to understand that point of view.

Then we'll reach a point where when we find life in space we won't be sure if it's from us or not. :)

Edit: what a good story idea.

> we won't be sure if it's from us or not.

Yeah, we would with 100% certainty. Life on Earth is based on the sum of an incredible number of random events. (See "butterfly effect".) The chances of coming up with the same, or even remotely related, result elsewhere are zero.

It's less than the chance there's a doppelganger of you here on Earth with the same DNA (and he's not the twin your mom lost).

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