Word: bacterias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lengthy,unrepeatable process that has led to today'sdelicate ecological balance. The word is alsosupposed to embody, Wilson told me, a sense ofwonder, a sense of respect, and a sense ofgratitude. "The most despised organisms from theburying beetles to ants that are scurrying awaycarrying dead insects, down to the bacteria whichactually bring the soil to life," he says, "arethe reasons that we are able to carry on from oneday to the next...
...future will be transported to work in his robocar. None of these advances are without their costs and risks. Drexler's assemblers, for example, could create bounties of goods and services -- or they could unleash artificial pests of unimaginable destructiveness. One nightmare creature from Drexler's book: an omnivorous bacteria-size robot that spreads like blowing pollen, replicates swiftly and reduces the biosphere to dust in a matter of days...
Robot probes no bigger than bacteria will eventually be possible. According to K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation, they will use nanotechnology to assemble devices atom by atom or molecule by molecule. His colleagues have already made motors smaller in diameter than a human hair. Drexler believes a bundle of nanorobots, weighing practically nothing, would be the perfect interstellar emissaries. Having arrived at a planet or asteroid around some distant star, perhaps in a solar sailship pushed to high speeds by a powerful laser beam from earth, they would go to work, antlike, building radio transmitters and other...
Noon. As the gruel is doled out, cooks keep the six vats brewing, boiling dense brown river water to purge at least some of the bacteria, then stirring in the Unimix with wooden poles. One cook estimates that it will take 80 vats to feed everyone here this day. At least, he says, there is enough food. Two weeks before, inadequate supplies stirred the crowd into a frenzy. Mothers tore pots from starving children to feed their own. "It was terrible," recalls Dr. Ayub Sheik Yeron, the UNICEF representative who set up this feeding center last month. "When people have...
...reason bacteria acquire resistance to several antibiotics is that many drugs are derivative of one another. For example, when bacteria developed an enzyme to chew up penicillin, drug designers retaliated with larger antibiotic molecules that did not fit into the site that serves as that enzyme's "mouth." In short order, says Dr. Mitchell Cohen, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, "the bacteria responded to the challenge by developing an enzyme with a bigger mouth...