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The first-of-its-kind discovery, described as "a dream of many fiction writers," was a huge leap forward in understanding how specimens -- perhaps even humans -- can be preserved for generations. The bdelloid rotifer is awake – and we're going to need to buy some more birthday candles. For the past 24,000 years, the multicellular microorganism had been snoozing in Siberian permafrost, having become frozen in the Arctic ice right around the same time in history that humans first ventured into North America during the Upper Paleolithic era, otherwise known as the Late Stone Age. A bdelloid rotifer is a freshwater...

When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain - Eukaryota. They named their discovery Lokiarchaeota, after the Loki's Castle hydrothermal vent near Greenland where it was found; but doubt shadowed the finding. Could the sample have been contaminated by something else in the core? Now, thanks to the work of Japanese scientists, those doubts can be put to rest. For...

The New York City subway is cramped with people, but a new study shows that the underground system may be much more crowded than we realized. Scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College have unveiled their findings after 18 months swabbing turnstiles, ticket kiosks, railings and benches for DNA on the world's largest transport system. They found 15,152 different types of microorganisms that share the train with its 5.5 million riders, including bubonic plague, dysentery and meningitis.  Principal Investigator Dr Chris Mason and his team released findings from their 'PathoMap' study on Thursday, a map of all the microorganisms and DNA...

A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe is suddenly flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico. And the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers led by Terry Hazen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ... the bacteria may have adapted over time due to periodic leaks and natural seeps of oil in the Gulf.

After more than 120,000 years trapped beneath a block of ice in Greenland, a tiny microbe has awoken. The long-lasting bacteria may hold clues to what life forms might exist on other planets. The new bacteria species was found nearly 2 miles (3 km) beneath a Greenland glacier, where temperatures can dip well below freezing, pressure soars, and food and oxygen are scarce. "We don't know what state they were in," said study team member Jean Brenchley of Pennsylvania State University. "They could've been dormant, or they could've been slowly metabolizing, but we don't know for sure."

December 23, 2006 From Scum, Perhaps the Tiniest Form of Life By WILLIAM J. BROAD The smallest form of life known to science just got smaller. Four million of a newly discovered microbe — assuming the discovery, reported yesterday in the journal Science, is confirmed — could fit into the period at the end of this sentence. Scientists found the microbes living in a remarkably inhospitable environment, drainage water as caustic as battery acid from a mine in Northern California. The microbes, members of an ancient family of organisms known as archaea, formed a pink scum on green pools of...

DVDs coated with a layer of protein could one day hold so much information that storing data on your computer hard drive will be obsolete, says a US-based researcher. He says that the protein layer, made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins, could allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston reported his findings at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane this week. "What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," he says. Renugopalakrishnan says high-capacity storage devices...

Microbe is a factual book that goes a long way toward informing the reader about a broad cross section of infectious diseases and biohazards that we must face in the coming years. All scientists should be aware of the inner workings of bacterial and viral epidemics, and this book provides a solid base of information on risks as varied as smallpox, influenza, anthrax, and cryptosporidiosis. The text is mostly structured as one chapter per disease, providing both historical and scientific details quite successfully. Microbe is also a book designed to disrupt our sense of complacency about the public health system...

Excerpt - TSUKUBA, Ibaraki -- A mysterious marine microbe, half of whose individual cells eat algae like animals while the rest perform photosynthesis like plants, has been discovered, a University of Tsukuba research team said. The discovery, the first of its kind, will be carried in the U.S. magazine Science that will be published on Friday. "I think the discovery of the 'half-animal, half-plant' microbe shows part of the process of single-cell marine microbes evolving into plants," Prof. Isao Inoue, a member of the research team, said.

Small but perfectly formed, Pelagibacter ubique is a lean machine stripped down to the bare essentials for life.Humans have around 30,000 genes that determine everything from our eye colour to our sex but Pelagibacter has just 1,354, US biologists report in the journal Science. What is more, Pelagibacter has none of the genetic clutter that most genomes have accumulated over time. There are no duplicate gene copies, no viral genes, and no junk DNA. 'Chicken soup'The spareness of its genome is related to its frugal lifestyle. The shorter the length of DNA that needs to be copied each generation, the...

<p>A newly discovered microscopic creature from the deep sea can survive in heat of up to 266 degrees Fahrenheit, a new record for life on earth, University of Massachusetts researchers reported yesterday.</p> <p>The one-celled organism not only lived but grew successfully at 121 degrees centigrade, the temperature inside doctors' sterilization equipment, long believed to be hot enough to kill any life form.</p>

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 September 30 D. rad Bacteria: Candidate Astronauts Credit: Michael Daly (Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences), DOE Explanation: These bacteria could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to genotoxic chemicals. Amazingly, they even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually with 48 hours. Known as an extremophile, bacteria...

Tough little microbe may be Martian Russian scientists have suggested that a bug known for its resistance to radiation may have come from Mars. Tests show it would have taken longer than the 3.8 billion years that life has been present on Earth to evolve such a resistance. They say Deinococcus radiodurans may have arrived from a higher radiation environment on pieces of meteorite. The study was carried out by a team from the Ioffe Physio-Technical Institute in St Petersburg. The microbe has baffled scientists because it can withstand several thousand times the lethal dose for humans. The Ioffe team...