Archive for the ‘Microbes’ Category

Clothing Made From Wine

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

A scientist, a winemaker and a fashion designer walk into a bar…

No. Really. They all walk into a bar. The totally not funny but awesome punchline is something called Micro’be’.

During a recent exploration of possible future fabrics and textiles at FNAS Laboratories in Australia.

According to the brains behind this:

“It is very delicate, comprising micro-fibrils of cellulose. The bacteria that caused the spoilage were a colony of Acetobacter, transforming wine into vinegar. The by-product of this activity is the formation of cellulose, a slimy, rubbery, skin-like substance.”

Drinking wine and having clothes manifest on your body could possibly undo thousands of years of tradition of it being the other way around.

[BioAlloy]

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African Lake Turns Hot Pink, Is Super, Thanks For Asking

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

While not quite a fashionable ‘Apocalyptic Red’ color, Lake Retba in Senegal, West Africa does something flamboyantly cool… it turns pink… like awesome strawberry-milk pink.

Lake Retba and the Dead Sea were given those names because it they were once thought to not be able to harbor life. Those lakes however are alive with a salt-loving organism called Dunaliella Salina which produce a red pigment that sunlights helps to turn pink.

Workers who harvest the salt often spend six to seven hours in the waters of the lake and cover themselves with shea butter which helps provide skin protection and from having salt crystals adhere to their bodies during their time in the lake.

[Daily Mail UK]

Posted in Microbes, Water, Weird | 2 Comments »

Newly Discovered Microbe Super Small, Bizarre, Works In Copper Mine

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

skitched-20100505-155713.jpg

Could this microbe be discovered under any less awesome conditions?

Researchers have discovered some of the tiniest and weirdest microbes ever seen growing in a copper mine sludge that is as acidic as battery acid.

Theses ultra-small microbes were first discovered four years ago, but now scientists have reconstructed their genomes (an organism’s genetic material) and found that they are among the simplest ever described for a living organism.

Named ARMAN, or archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms, as a nod to the mine’s owner, Ted Arman, these Archaea (the domain of life that groups together once-celled creatures) are rivaled in size only by a microbe that survives solely as a parasite attached to other cells. ARMAN, however, appears to exist largely as a free-living organism, but oddly, researchers discovered up to ten percent of their specimens impaled on needle-like protuberances originating from another microbe, Thermoplasmatales.

“It is really remarkable and suggests an interaction that has never been described before in nature,” said Brett J. Baker of the University of California at Berkeley.

Awesome.

[Live Science]

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