Quotes About Bacteria

Crookes was talking about fixing a couple of million tonnes of nitrogen a year to assure Europe's wheat supplies for the foreseeable future. Today industry fixes over a hundred million tonnes a year, comfortably more than all the Earth's nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria put together.

Today, although the terms have changed, the concepts remain the same. Now the evils released from Pandora's box have more specific names like pests, vermin, bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, toxins, cancer, heart disease, and pain—all of which have inflicted suffering or limited lives.

If you were a tiny organism in a forest's soil, you would be enmeshed in a carnival of activity, with mycelium constantly moving through subterranean landscapes like cellular waves, through dancing bacteria and swimming protozoa with nematodes racing like whales through a microcosmic sea of life.

NASA reports that microbiologists at the University of Tennessee, led by Gary Sayler, have developed a rugged biological computer chip housing bacteria that glow upon sensing pollutants, from heavy metals to PCBs (Miller 2004). Such innovations hint at new microbiotechnologies on the near horizon. Working together, fungal networks and environmentally responsive bacteria could provide us with data about pH, detect nutrients and toxic waste, and even measure biological populations.