Cable bacteria are living batteries | Hacker News Reader

Cable bacteria are living batteries

asimov.press

83 pointsmailyk21 comments

Took me a while to realise this wasn't about bacteria that congregate around undersea cables.

I was imagining bacteria feeding on my USB cables. There’s probably some species that lives in the gunk in the ports.

What's special about usb cables? Some of them feature decent nylon braided jackets (and some even silicone ones). Other than that they are just run of of mill low wage cables.

Same I was thinking electric power lines and bacteria that feed from the voltage differential.

I thought it was about a small group of bacteria secretly engaged in a plot or intrigue, often with the aim of gaining or maintaining power.

It kind of is like cabal bacteria, actually.

Does this mean that bacteria in the middle of the cable live off the electric potential alone (and, I suppose, whatever nutrients they can find at their position in the wire, even if they are not energy-given)? If so, one could build biochemical factories for producing glucose polymers that use solar panels instead of leaves. Leaves are more practical by almost all accounts, except that they are not easy to deploy in space's vacuum....

It allows the lower cells in the cable to perform cellular respiration by transferring electrons up the chain.

This benefits the top cells in the chain by making the mud less hospitable to competitors. So the bottom cells and top cells all win.

There is a much better article here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250130131404/https://www.scien...

Article from the Aarhus University group that is a little less hyped up:"Are all microbes electroactive?" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...

Asimov Press / Nico McCarthy write excellent stories; well worth having a look at the Substack if you are not familiar with them.

Hmm... It would be nice to replace axons in human with these structures. The speed of propagation of spikes will be much higher. I'm not sure that it worth it to replace axons in brains, but those long axons in a spinal cord and in optic nerve can really benefit from the faster signal propagation and reduce the reaction time.

Axons are not just wires, they also do computation and signal processing: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1397 Your idea would sinoly not work.

The potential (positive) environmental impact of cable bacteria is notable.

"Given that rice agriculture alone accounts for about 11 percent of human-driven methane emissions, adding cable bacteria to rice paddies could have an enormous positive impact on the environment."

Who knew rice paddies were such a huge contributor to climate change.

Methane isn't cumulative in the way CO2 is, it degrades to CO2 in the atmosphere in decade timescales.

It sounds like you're downplaying methane's impact on climate change. I don't know enough about climate change to challenge your point but it does seem like methane a serious enough issue that some countries have considered culling hundreds of thousands of livestock to reduce emissions and meet climate goals.

https://www.dairyherd.com/news/business/ireland-proposes-cul...

Hmmm .. was looking for some potential about power generation, guess the idea never sparked.

Microbial fuel cells have been researched for quite a while. Its a brilliant idea but within an incredibly competitive technology space (e.g. lithium, etc). Living materials also die or work differently each time they are implemented (e.g. see issues with device to device variation in neural organoid sensors for chemicals/"chemical noses").

My boss says the same thing about me.

>“What is this?” I asked. “It looks like hair.” Marshall chuckled. “That’s them — the cable bacteria,” he said. “If you watch closely, you’ll see them twitching.” I stared harder. The filaments shifted.

This schmaltzy student-teacher roleplay immersion-journalism feels false and infantilizing to me. It makes me mistrustful of the text and I avoid reading essays written like it. The facts are embedded in an artificial adventure narrative as one feeds a dog a pill by hiding it in peanut butter. Why? Would the non-sensationalized, plainly framed information content be too un-stimulating for readers? Are false narratives hidden inside?

>Obama chuckled. "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"

Speak for yourself, I enjoyed it. The immersion makes it more interesting.

I think it’s safe to assume every commenter speaks for themselves. I agree with the grandparent comment, this narration is cheesy and I couldn’t get through it, or figure out the point. If it’s fan fiction, it should be labeled as such. But, if there is news in there, I’d like a TLDR synopsis. Fortunately, there is a browser extension for that :)

"It's all stories."

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