> ...are filamentous bacteria that conduct electricity across distances over 1 cm in sediment and groundwater aquifers. Cable bacteria allow for long distance electron transport, which connects electron donors to electron acceptors, connecting previously separated oxidation and reduction reactions.
Cable bacteria and bacterial nanowires [2] seem to form linear bacterial colonies [3] that conduct electrons.
It’s discoveries like this that cement my belief that we fundamentally don’t know the actual effects when we decide that we’re being “safe enough” for the planet.
'Electric mud' was Muddy Waters' 1968 attempt to create a psychedelic record to connect with the youth of the day. He did not even play guitar on the record.
Despite the sneering of blues traditionalists, it is a great record.
I saw the title and thought that it was about Muddy Waters and was disappointed when I clicked through.
BTW. The Electric Mud album was recorded using Muddy's regular band and then the psychedelic tracks were remixed in. If you listen carefully you can hear Pinetop Perkins, Willy Smith and the rest of the band. I remember hearing a remastered version without the psychedelic tracks and it was much better.
Oh wow. I didn't know that existed. That sounds like a fascinating cultural experience. I don't know why those odd-ball one-offs are so fascinating, but they are.
Check out Dukes of the Stratosphere. It’s an alter ego of XTC, a British alt pop band from the 80s, making classic/psychedelic rock. Some of XTCs other work is great too, especially Skylarking.
One of my favorites: Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The Bryds were decidedly psychedelic, and for whatever reason let Gram Parsons make an album for them. Well worth the listen even if you're not into country music.
They barely let Gram Parsons make an album for them -- they fought with him during its creation, and he left before it was released. Because he immediately formed The Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris Hillman, another Byrd, I suspect Hillman was an ally in trying country after five psychedelic albums. Remember, this was an era when musicians were fleshing out what rock music could be (you can see this in the Beatles' 1960s albums from simple poppy songs to Indian drones, jazz chords, and multitrack madness) and seeing what else you could cut it with (Indian, folk, etc.).
In that spirit, the self-titled album, The Great Speckled Bird, is worth checking out. The songwriters and vocalists are Ian and Sylvia, probably most famous for Four Strong Winds.
The researchers used "[...] custom microsensors that detected changes in the mud’s chemistry."
I have been toying with the idea of analysing the composition of soils for house plants etc, but never had the time to actually dig deep enough to get started working on it. My shallow searches for raspberry pi sensors was not super succecssful (they do exist, but most projects seem old and abandoned)
Are there any affordable sensors out there that can be used to analyse soil samples? Alternatively, what knowledge is required to build sensors that can detect chemical composition of soil?
Our innate fixation on categorizing everything has given us strange blind spots all over the place. Take the whole thing with plants in a rain forest communicating via chemicals and intermediate fungii and all sorts of things - we insist on thinking of them as separate organisms mutely battling each other, or (hippie hat firmly in place) as a single cohesive whole living in harmony.
In reality it's neither, it's a disparate bunch of organisms in a complicated web of iterated cooperation and defection in a cutthroat battle for individual (and therefore often communal) survival.
I think this is actually a major point that doesn't get discussed enough. Our human impulse to apply a rigid taxonomy to things, to model them as discrete, absolute units instead of complex systems, is obviously very useful and intuitive, but comes up short when we try to study things of sufficient complexity.
If I might make a gentle counterpoint: if we didn't follow a rigorous reductionist process, the article you are commenting on wouldn't exist and we wouldn't know a thing about bacteria forming large-scale structures in order to take advantage of spatially separated resources in their environment. I wouldn't say that our blind spots exist because scientists follow a reductionist line of inquiry; instead, I think our blind spots exist because we are, to some degree, born ignorant in a universe of evolving life. Now, of course the reductionist process can't tell us everything, but I think it is possible to recognize and appreciate what the process can help us understand.
Identifying a gap in our understanding of something can be as conversely significant as a given finding. I take umbrage with allowing reductionism to prevent consideration of other ideas where it fails to explain something. I know it's not scientific to suppose the balance of life's complex systems is deterministic, but if you look at population dynamics a possible explanation is homeostasis as the destination state. The motivations of the individual be damned, life seems to find a balance. Perhaps our understanding of what's really going on in the biosphere is as limited as the perspective of an immune cell in the human body. Just saying, determinism might not be terribly scientific, but it's still worth considering in the context of what we can't explain with reductionism. You have to admit, what we're all experiencing right now, life, is pretty flippin' remarkable.
Maybe I am misunderstanding the terms we are using. Allow me to articulate what I think the valuable line of inquiry is here, and then maybe you can identify what I am missing philosophically, because I'm still not sure exactly what that is, even after reading your comment.
In my thinking, a reductionist thought process goes something like this: we observe oxidation of the hydrogen sulfide in mud, even when there are no apparent electron acceptors in the immediate vicinity. We then identify bacterial filaments which appear to allow electron transport from the reducing agent to the electron acceptor. Furthermore, we will then attempt to isolate the bacteria making up the filaments, and then attempt to identify what structures they synthesize to allow this feat.
And a few follow up questions to your comment: what do you think population dynamics have to do with the current phenomenon, or was that more a related thought? When you talk about "destination states," are you insinuating that there is some design occurring, or that we can observe states in the state space that seem to be stable, and that random walks tend to end up in those stable states? If it is the latter, I totally agree, and I don't see how that is outside of the purview of science as traditionally practiced. It might be an interpretation or model for how the parts of a system fit together, but an attempt at synthesis is basically in the conclusions section of any paper ever written in biology. So I guess it boils down to the same question I posed earlier: how exactly are scientists failing to describe natural phenomena?
What if we look at it from the other side, too? How much competition and individual optimization is going on among the cells in the bodies and brains of animals, including humans? I suppose one of the big differences is the shared lineage and DNA, though I don't know how much that affects cooperation.
Exactly! We think ourselves as a single thing but we're more like a megalopolis inhabited mostly by bacteria with infrastructure provided by a clone army.
Of course in our dystopian internal society any unsanctioned individuality is quashed by the militarised police... unless of course it isn't at which point it metastatizes and everyone dies.
(The question about shared DNA is really interesting - so much of our individual drive for survival is a result of our K-strategist genetics and the resultant selection pressures over the years. If we spawned like octopi or grew from spores like orks, how much different would our worldview be?)
Many types of stem cells indeed undergo competitive selection within a tissue, and the victors differentiate into somatic cells. Reduced competition within this process is responsible for things like skin aging.
Yep, just think of eukaryotes themselves -- symbiosis between entirely different kingdoms of life (bacterial mitochondria & archaea host) is built into the very lifeform itself. And when they form multicellular creatures, and then those multicellular creatures hang with other creatures... it's so blurry.
Not only are we intensely focused on categorizing, we also have the need/instinct to identify "things" and "units" and "selves" -- when in reality those lines 'between things' don't really exist except as a tool for cognition.
What's the alternative? Never categorizing anything? Breaking complex things into simpler parts is the foundation of most understanding.
Yes categorization implies putting things in boxes, and the box chosen is often the incorrect abstraction. However i think the answer is to make better boxes; not throw out the idea of categorizing things. Similar to how if your code base is full of bad abstractions, you wouldn't try to fix it by having no abstractions.
When would it not be appropriate? Even calling something sui generis is an act of categorization (not that very many things are, esoecially natural things)
Sure category errors are a thing, but the error is not in the act of categorizing something at all. They are errors in using an inapropriate schemata.
At least regarding this particular piece, it seems to me (microbiology PhD) that we have a perfectly adequate definition of organism (I like a definition of life put forwards by NASA: a self-sustaining chemical system capable of undergoing evolution). It is a definition that allowed us to discover and formulate answerable questions about an interesting and novel (to us, at least) form of life, after all. Moreover, cooperative bacteria forming large-scale structures is not new to science (see, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxococcus_xanthus). What do you think needs to be added to the definition of organism? What do you think would be gained from that addition?
Is each of us? Is the truth that it depends on context? You're about 10% human by cell count but 97% human by weight, as am I. The microflora and microfauna of the gut, mouth, and skin are amazingly deep topics we as a species have so far only shallowly investigated.
On another level and somewhat figuatively, is the Internet a society of its own or simply a bridge among societies? Is it a bunch of communities (definitely yes at some level) or one big community with several sub-communities and cliques? Is it a culture, a subculture, a counterculture, a blending of cultures, a point of contact between distinct cultures? Yes, it's all that, and in certain contexts more one than another.
Interested why the difference between cell count and cell weight is so different in the human and non-human parts? Most of the total weight is water, right? So why is all of the water stored in the human cells but not in the non-human cells?
In general eukaryotic cells are much larger than prokaryotic cells, and most of the non-human cells in a human are prokaryotic. All bacteria for example are prokaryotic.
I don't think the fraction of water is higher in eukaryotic cells than in prokaryotic cells. I think water constitutes about 70% of both types of cells.
The Black Sea is rich on hydrogen sulfide. Googling on cable bacteria and Black Sea showed this:
Cable bacteria can limit sulfide release by promoting iron oxide formation in sediments.[1]
[...] we used laboratory incubations to assess whether cable bacteria can establish in iron (Fe) monosulphide-poor coastal Black Sea sediment and to determine the impact of their activity on the cycling of Fe, phosphorus (P) and sulphur (S). [...] we show that the enrichments in Fe oxides induced by cable bacteria are located in a thin subsurface layer of 0.3 mm. We show that similar subsurface layers enriched in Fe and P are also observed at field sites where cable bacteria were recently active and little bioturbation occurs.[2]
Yeah, but my metabolic processes sometimes do have an effect many kilometers away.
It's like with ants, they can carry things many times their size, but if ant was the size of an elephant and made with the same materials, it couldn't even support itself.
It’s analogous of trying to simulate oceanic phenomena in a bathtub. Like when they have miniature movie scenes shot in a pool and they simulate waves and water gushing, it just doesn’t scale well. In other words a 2 inch wave doesn’t break the same way a 20 foot wave does.
This whole mud special issue is really quite good.
I remember many times in childhood being at the beach and trying to "help" the stream reach the water. The end result was always a muddy mess. Lesson learned, let the water meander.
When I got my teaching credential in 2002–4, I had to do a few general education requirements even though I already had a B.A., one of them was a semester of biology. I'd taken two years of bio in high school in the 80s and the difference in what was known in those two decades was astonishing.
>The discoveries are forcing researchers to rewrite textbooks
I see comments like this all too often. It makes it sound like textbooks were not supposed to be updated anyways. I fear people expect science to "settle".
> ...are filamentous bacteria that conduct electricity across distances over 1 cm in sediment and groundwater aquifers. Cable bacteria allow for long distance electron transport, which connects electron donors to electron acceptors, connecting previously separated oxidation and reduction reactions.
Cable bacteria and bacterial nanowires [2] seem to form linear bacterial colonies [3] that conduct electrons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_bacteria
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_nanowires
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(biology)