Word: bacterias
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...CHICKENS harbor Salmonella and 90% are contaminated with Campylobacter, an equally stomach-sickening and potentially deadly bacterium. The study blames the practice of immersing carcasses in hot water to loosen feathers; the report, disputed by the poultry industry, says the water is not hot enough to kill the bacteria and encourages them to spread...
...Even so excellent a preservative as amber apparently can't keep DNA from breaking down into fragments that may be scientifically interesting but are biologically inert. That's one reason many researchers doubt the claims of California scientists who announced last year that they had managed to revive bacteria preserved in amber for 25 million years...
...there is also a small chance that the technology that allows people like Getty to receive tissues from animals could someday unleash a medical disaster. The danger is that patients could receive a previously unknown microbe along with their transplants. When viruses or bacteria have made the jump from animals to humans in the past, they have often proved exceedingly virulent: HIV, which causes AIDS; Ebola virus; and hantavirus are all chilling precedents. In a worst-case scenario, such transplants could introduce humanity to a plague that would make all of those look tame. "This is a serious mistake," says...
...oxygen through photosynthesis - the metabolic alchemy that allowed primordial algae to turn carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into energy - was almost perfectly balanced by oxygen-depleting processes, especially organic decay. Indeed, the vast populations of algae that smothered the Precambrian oceans generated tons of vegetative debris, and as bacteria decomposed this slimy detritus, they performed photosynthesis in reverse, consuming oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that traps heat and helps warm the planet...
...take food in at one end and expel wastes at the other, may be the key to the Cambrian explosion. Their reasoning goes something like this: animals grazed on the algae, packaging the leftover organic material into fecal pellets. These pellets dropped to the ocean depths, depriving oxygen-depleting bacteria of their principal food source. The evidence? Organic lipids in ancient rocks, notes Hayes, underwent a striking change in carbon-isotope ratios around 550 million years ago. Again, the change suggests that food sources rich in carbon 12, like algae, were being "express mailed" to the ocean floor...