Bacterial spores can survive for years, even centuries, without nutrients, resisting heat, UV radiation, and antibiotics. How inert, sleeping bacteria -- or spores -- spring back to life has been a ...

Scientists have demonstrated a creative solution to plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental problems. Plastic was embedded with spores of plastic-eating bacteria that are activated ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Bacteria can generally be divided into two classes: those with just one membrane and those with two. Now researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have used a ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

(Nanowerk News) Bacterial spores are one of nature’s most resilient organisms. These tiny, seed-like structures form when bacteria enter a dormant state to survive unfavorable conditions. They can ...

"Remove the Kapton tape and activate the battery." "But captain, these batteries must be 100 years old!" "They'll work, trust me." That may sound like a scene from a Star Trek rerun, but it could ...

The master chemists known as Streptomyces bacteria have turned a compound rich with the tangy odor of moist soil into a hitchhiking scam. This group of bacteria, the inspiration for streptomycin and ...

Microbes like viruses and bacteria have adapted to live virtually everywhere, including inside the gastrointestinal tracts of many animals and humans. But how do these microorganisms propogate their ...

Solving a riddle that has confounded biologists since bacterial spores — inert, sleeping bacteria — were first described more than 150 years ago, researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered ...