Latest news with #microorganisms
Daily Mail
22-06-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
The horrifying truth about why you should NEVER use your phone on the toilet
Taking your phone to the toilet may keep you entertained while you do your business. But this common habit can turn your device into a haven for dangerous microorganisms, a scientist warns. Dr Primrose Freestone, professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Leicester, says fecal bacteria can easily reach your phone in the bathroom. This includes E. coli, which can result in nasty diarrhea and stomach cramps, and Pseudomonas, which causes infections in the blood and lungs. Even after you've washed your hands with soap, these bugs can travel back to your hands once you touch your phone again. As a result, phones should be kept out of the toilet altogether, and regularly sanitized with alcohol wipes. 'The phone will at some point get contaminated, so periodically disinfecting your phone is a good idea,' she told MailOnline. 'My Nokia gets a disinfectant wipe over twice a week.' When we flush a toilet, a plume of tiny liquid droplets containing bacteria and fecal matter, invisible to the naked eye, is violently ejected. According to prior research at the University of Colorado Boulder, this so-called 'toilet plume' can travel 5 feet (1.5 metres) in eight seconds. Therefore, anything that is within five feet of the toilet bowl can become contaminated, whether it's the floor, the wall or a nearby book. Research also suggests that this dreaded plume still escapes when we've got the toilet lid closed. As a result, Professor Freestone urges people to keep their phone well away from the toilet, or even better, out of the bathroom entirely. 'Toilet areas adjacent to toilets, because of the toilet spray trajectory, are pretty contaminated,' she told MailOnline. 'It does not matter where you go, there will be faecal bacteria on lots of [bathroom] surfaces. 'So soaps and taps, toilet and wash basin surfaces, door handles, bath mats – the list is long.' If you're holding your phone while you empty you bowels, putting it on the floor before flushing is one of the worst things you can do. That's because fecal matter whizzes out of the toilet upon flushing and eventually settles onto the floor. 'The floor around the toilet will – if not disinfected regularly – have traces of faeces with lots gut bacteria, which will stay alive for hours and days,' said Professor Freestone. 'So I would not put your phone on the floor next to the toilet as it is likely to pick up the faeces and the bacteria associated with the waste product.' Even if you put your phone on another nearby surface, such as the cistern or the nearby windowsill, it could risk contamination too. Professor Freestone acknowledges it can be hard to be separated from your phone, even for the relatively short time it takes to use the toilet. In extreme instances – such as not wanting to miss a very important phone call, for example – she suggests keeping it in your pocket for the whole time. Even though we may not appreciate it, phones are high-touch items particularly at risk of bacterial contamination just like doorknobs, light switches and taps. Therefore, we should be washing our hands much more often before or after touching them, while also keeping them sanitized, she added. Using a 70 per cent alcohol wipe or a mild soap and water mixture are good options, but don't submerge it if it's not waterproof, or use harsh chemicals like bleach. The specialist in home hygiene and food safety has also weighed in on the best way to position your toilet paper. In the 'over' position, the next square of toilet paper is facing the user, while in the 'under' position, the next square of toilet paper is facing the wall. Aerosol droplets containing urine, faeces and vomit stay in the air for up to 20 seconds Tiny droplets carrying traces of urine, faeces, vomit and viruses float into the air at mouth-level after a toilet is flushed, a 2021 study warned. It showed that tens of thousands of particles are spewed into the air by a flush and can rise several feet above the ground. Droplets were spotted floating around five feet (1.5m) in the air for more than 20 seconds, with researchers pointing out this poses a risk of inhalation. Small droplets and aerosols are so light they can float around in the air on tiny draughts, before settling on a surface. Researchers say that they can also act as vectors for diseases. SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid, for example, has been found alive in human faeces. Therefore, scientists warn that flush-propelled particles from an infected person's faeces could float into the air, be sucked in by a passer-by, and infect them.
News24
21-06-2025
- Science
- News24
How did life survive 'Snowball Earth'? In ponds, study suggests
Earth has not always been so hospitable to live. During several ice ages, the planet's surface was almost completely frozen over, creating what has been dubbed "Snowball Earth". Liquid water appears to be the most important ingredient for life on any planet, raising the question: how did anything survive such frosty, brutal times? A group of scientists said Thursday that they had found an astonishing diversity of microorganisms in tiny pools of melted ice in Antarctica, suggesting that life could have ridden out Snowball Earth in similar ponds. During the Cryogenian Period between 635 and 720 million years ago, the average global temperature did not rise above -50 degrees Celsius. The climate near the equator at the time resembled modern-day Antarctica. Yet even in such extreme conditions, life found a way to keep evolving. Fatima Husain, the lead author of a new study published in Nature Communications, told AFP there was evidence of complex life forms "before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record". "There are multiple hypotheses regarding possible places life may have persisted," said Husain, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps it found shelter in patches of open ocean, or in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, or under vast sheets of ice. The tiny melted ice pools that dotted the equator were another proposed refuge. These ponds could have been oases for eukaryotes, complex organisms that eventually evolved into multicellular life forms that would rise to dominate Earth, including humans. READ | SA environment lawyer globally recognised for work to have Antarctica declared a legal person Could aliens be hiding in ponds? Melted ice ponds still exist today in Antarctica, at the edges of ice sheets. In 2018, members of a New Zealand research team visited the McMurdo ice shelf in east Antarctica, home to several such pools, which are only a few metres wide and less a metre deep. The bottom of the ponds are lined with a mat of microbes that have accumulated over the years to form slimy layers. "These mats can be a few centimetres thick, colourful, and they can be very clearly layered," Husain said. They are made up of single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria that are known to be able to survive extreme conditions. But the researchers also found signs indicating there were eukaryotes such as algae or microscopic animals. This suggests there was surprising diversity in the ponds, which appears to have been influenced by the amount of salt each contained. "No two ponds were alike," Husain said. "We found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied." "They demonstrate that these unique environments are capable of sheltering diverse assemblages of life, even in close proximity," she added. This could have implications in the search for extraterrestrial life. "Studies of life within these special environments on Earth can help inform our understanding of potential habitable environments on icy worlds, including icy moons in our Solar System," Husain said. Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa are covered in ice, but scientists increasingly suspect they could be home to simple forms of life, and several space missions have been launched to find out more about them.
Japan Times
21-06-2025
- Science
- Japan Times
How did life survive 'Snowball Earth'? In ponds, study suggests.
Earth hasn't always been a hospitable place to live. During several ice ages, the planet's surface was almost completely frozen over, creating what has been dubbed "Snowball Earth." Liquid water appears to be the most important ingredient for life on any planet, raising the question: how did anything survive such frosty, brutal times? A group of scientists said Thursday that they had found an astonishing diversity of microorganisms in tiny pools of melted ice in Antarctica, suggesting that life could have ridden out Snowball Earth in similar ponds. During the Cryogenian Period between 635 and 720 million years ago, the average global temperature did not rise above minus 50 degrees Celsius. The climate near the equator at the time resembled modern-day Antarctica. Yet even in such extreme conditions, life found a way to keep evolving. Fatima Husain, the lead author of a new study published in Nature Communications, said there was evidence of complex life forms "before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record." "There are multiple hypotheses regarding possible places life may have persisted," said Husain, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps it found shelter in patches of open ocean, or in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, or under vast sheets of ice. The tiny melted ice pools that dotted the equator were another proposed refuge. These ponds could have been oases for eukaryotes, complex organisms that eventually evolved into multicellular life forms that would rise to dominate Earth, including humans. Melted ice ponds still exist today in Antarctica, at the edges of ice sheets. In 2018, members of a New Zealand research team visited the McMurdo ice shelf in east Antarctica, home to several such pools, which are only a few meters wide and less a meter deep. The bottom of the ponds are lined with a mat of microbes that have accumulated over the years to form slimy layers. "These mats can be a few centimeters thick, colorful, and they can be very clearly layered," Husain said. They are made up of single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria that are known to be able to survive extreme conditions. But the researchers also found signs indicating there were eukaryotes such as algae or microscopic animals. This suggests there was surprising diversity in the ponds, which appears to have been influenced by the amount of salt each contained. "No two ponds were alike," Husain said. "We found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied." "They demonstrate that these unique environments are capable of sheltering diverse assemblages of life, even in close proximity," she added. This could have implications in the search for extraterrestrial life. "Studies of life within these special environments on Earth can help inform our understanding of potential habitable environments on icy worlds, including icy moons in our Solar System," Husain said. Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa are covered in ice, but scientists increasingly suspect they could be home to simple forms of life, and several space missions have been launched to find out more about them.
Yahoo
19-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
How did life survive 'Snowball Earth'? In ponds, study suggests
Earth has not always been so hospitable to live. During several ice ages, the planet's surface was almost completely frozen over, creating what has been dubbed "Snowball Earth". Liquid water appears to be the most important ingredient for life on any planet, raising the question: how did anything survive such frosty, brutal times? A group of scientists said Thursday that they had found an astonishing diversity of micro-organisms in tiny pools of melted ice in Antarctica, suggesting that life could have ridden out Snowball Earth in similar ponds. During the Cryogenian Period between 635 and 720 million years ago, the average global temperature did not rise above -50 degrees Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit). The climate near the equator at the time resembled modern-day Antarctica. Yet even in such extreme conditions, life found a way to keep evolving. Fatima Husain, the lead author of a new study published in Nature Communications, told AFP there was evidence of complex life forms "before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record". "There are multiple hypotheses regarding possible places life may have persisted," said Husain, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps it found shelter in patches of open ocean, or in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, or under vast sheets of ice. The tiny melted ice pools that dotted the equator were another proposed refuge. These ponds could have been oases for eukaryotes, complex organisms that eventually evolved into multicellular life forms that would rise to dominate Earth, including humans. - Could aliens be hiding in ponds? - Melted ice ponds still exist today in Antarctica, at the edges of ice sheets. In 2018, members of a New Zealand research team visited the McMurdo ice shelf in east Antarctica, home to several such pools, which are only a few metres wide and less a metre deep. The bottom of the ponds are lined with a mat of microbes that have accumulated over the years to form slimy layers. "These mats can be a few centimetres thick, colourful, and they can be very clearly layered," Husain said. They are made up of single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria that are known to be able to survive extreme conditions. But the researchers also found signs indicating there were eukaryotes such as algae or microscopic animals. This suggests there was surprising diversity in the ponds, which appears to have been influenced by the amount of salt each contained. "No two ponds were alike," Husain said. "We found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied." "They demonstrate that these unique environments are capable of sheltering diverse assemblages of life, even in close proximity," she added. This could have implications in the search for extraterrestrial life. "Studies of life within these special environments on Earth can help inform our understanding of potential habitable environments on icy worlds, including icy moons in our Solar System," Husain said. Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa are covered in ice, but scientists increasingly suspect they could be home to simple forms of life, and several space missions have been launched to find out more about them. ber/dl/js
BBC News
11-06-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Weather makers: How microbes living in the clouds affect our lives
Trillions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and single-celled organisms travel the globe high in the atmosphere. Scientists are discovering they play a vital role in the weather and even our health. Clouds are our lifelong companions. Sometimes they drift overhead as wispy filigrees. On other days, they darken the sky and dump rain on us. But for all our familiarity with these veils of water vapour, they have been keeping a secret from us. Clouds are actually floating islands of life, home to trillions of organisms from thousands of species. Along with birds and dragonflies and dandelion seeds, a vast ocean of microscopic organisms travels through the air. The French chemist Louis Pasteur was among the first scientists to recognise what scientists now call the aerobiome in 1860. He held up sterile flasks of broth and allowed floating germs to settle into them, turning the clear broth cloudy. Pasteur captured germs on the streets of Paris, in the French countryside and even on top of a glacier in the Alps. But his contemporaries balked at the idea. "The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic," one journalist told Pasteur at the time. It took decades for people to accept the reality of the aerobiome. In the 1930s, a few scientists took to the sky in airplanes, holding out slides and Petri dishes to catch fungal spores and bacteria in the wind. Balloon expeditions to the stratosphere captured cells there as well. Today, 21st-Century aerobiologists deploy sophisticated air-samplers on drones and use DNA-sequencing technology to identify airborne life by its genes. The aerobiome, researchers now recognise, is an enormous habitat filled only with visitors. Those visitors come from much of the planet's surface. Each time an ocean wave crashes, it hurls fine droplets of sea water into the air, some of which carry viruses, bacteria, algae and other single-celled organisms. While some of the droplets fall quickly back to the ocean, some get picked up by winds and rise up into the sky, where they can be carried for thousands of miles. On land, winds can scour the ground, lofting bacteria and fungi and other organisms. Each morning when the sun rises and water evaporates into the air, it can draw up microscopic organisms as well. Forest fires create violent updrafts that can suck microbes out of the ground and strip them off the trunks and leaves of trees, carrying them upwards with the rising smoke. Many species do not simply wait for physical forces to launch them into the air. Mosses, for example, grow a stalk with a pouch of spores at the tip, which they release like puffs of smoke into the air. As many as six million moss spores may fall on a single square metre of bog over the course of one summer. Many species of pollinating plants have sex by releasing billions of airbourne pollen grains each spring. Fungi are particularly adept at flight. They have evolved biological cannons and other means for blasting their spores into the air, and their spores are equipped with tough shells and other adaptations to endure the harsh conditions they encounter as they travel as high as the stratosphere. Fungi have been found up to 12 miles (20km) up, high above the open ocean of the Pacific, carried there on the wind. By one estimate about a trillion trillion bacterial cells rise each year from the land and sea into the sky. By another estimate, 50 million tonnes of fungal spores become airborne in that same time. Untold numbers of viruses, lichen, algae and other microscopic life forms also rise into the air. It's common for them to travel for days before landing, in which time they can soar for hundreds or thousands of miles. During that odyssey, an organism may fly into a region of the air where the water vapor is condensing into droplets. It soon finds itself enveloped in one of those droplets, and updrafts may carry it up deeper inside the water mass. It has entered the heart of a cloud. Much of what scientists have learned about the life in clouds has come from the top of a mountain in France called Puy de Dôme. It formed about 11,000 years ago when a fist of magma punched up into the rolling hills of central France, creating a volcano that spilled out lava before going dormant just a few hundred years later. For the past twenty years or so, a weather station on top of Puy de Dôme has been equipped with air samplers. The mountain is so high that clouds regularly blanket its peak, allowing scientists to capture some of the life they ferry. Studies led by Pierre Amato, an aerobiologist at the nearby University of Clermont Auvergne, have revealed that every millimeter of cloud water floating over Puy de Dôme contains as many as 100,000 cells. Their DNA has revealed that some belong to familiar species, but many are new to science. Scientists who use DNA to identify species are perpetually anxious about contamination, and Amato is no exception. A hawk soaring over Puy de Dôme might fly over Amato's tubes and shake microbes off its feathers, for example. In Amato's laboratory, a graduate student may exhale germs into a test tube. Over the years, Amato has rejected thousands of potential species, suspicious that he or his students have inadvertently smeared skin microbes onto the equipment. But they have confidently discovered over 28,000 species of bacteria in clouds, and over 2,600 species of fungi. Amato and other scientists who study clouds suspect that they may be particularly good places for bacteria to survive – at least for some species. "Clouds are environments open to all, but where only some can thrive," Amato and a team of colleagues wrote in 2017. For bacteria, a cloud is like an alien world, dramatically different from the habitats where they usually live on land or at sea. Bacteria typically crowd together. In rivers they may grow into microbial mats. In our guts, they form dense films. But in a cloud, each microbe exists in perfect solitude, trapped in its own droplet. That isolation means that cloud bacteria don't have to compete with each other for limited resources. But a droplet doesn't have much room to carry the nutrients microbes need to grow. Yet Amato and his colleagues have found evidence that some microbes can indeed grow in clouds. In one study, the researchers compared samples they gathered from clouds on Puy de Dôme to others they collected on the mountain on clear days. The researchers looked for clues to their activity by comparing the amount of DNA in their samples to the amount of RNA. Active, growing cells will make a lot of copies of RNA from their DNA in order to produce proteins. The researchers found that the ratio of RNA to DNA was several times higher in clouds than in clear air, a powerful clue that cells thrive in clouds. They also found that bacteria in clouds switch on genes essential for metabolising food and for growing. To understand how these bacteria can thrive in clouds, the researchers have reared some of the species they've captured in their lab and then sprayed them into atmospheric simulation chambers. One kind of microbe, known as Methylobacterium, uses the energy in sunlight to break down organic carbon inside cloud droplets. In other words, these bacteria eat clouds. By one estimate, cloud microbes break down a million tons of organic carbon worldwide every year. Findings such as these suggest that the aerobiome is a force to be reckoned with – one that exerts a powerful influence on the chemistry of the atmosphere. The aerobiome even alters the weather. As a cloud forms, it creates updrafts that lift water-laden air to high altitudes that are cold enough to turn the water to ice. The ice then falls back down. If the air near the ground is cold, it may land as snow. If it is warm, it turns to rain. It can be surprisingly hard for ice to form in a frigid cloud. Even at temperatures far below the freezing point, water molecules can remain liquid. One way to trigger the formation of ice, however, is to give them a seed of impurity. As water molecules stick to a particle's surface, they bond to one another, a process known as nucleation. Other water molecules then lock onto them and assemble into a crystal structure, which when heavy enough, will fall out of the sky. It turns out that biological molecules and cell walls are exceptionally good at triggering rain. Fungi, algae, pollen, lichens, bacteria and even viruses can seed ice in clouds. It's even possible that clouds and life are linked in an intimate cycle, not just living and devouring the clouds, but helping them to form in the first place. One of the best rainmakers is a type of bacteria called Pseudomonas. Scientists are not sure why those bacteria in particular are so good at forming ice in clouds, but it could have to do with the way they grow on leaves. When cold rain falls on a leaf, Pseudomonas may help the liquid water to turn to ice at higher temperatures than it normally would. As the ice cracks open the leaves, the bacteria can feast on the nutrients inside. Some scientists have even speculated that plants welcome bacteria like Pseudomonas, despite the damage they cause. As the wind blows the bacteria off the plants and lofts them into the air, they rise into clouds overhead. Clouds seeded with Pseudomonas pour down more rain on the plants below. The plants use the water to grow more leaves, and the leaves support more bacteria, which rise into the sky and spur clouds to rain down even more water to nurture life below. If it turns out to be true, it would be a majestic symbiosis, connecting forests to the sky. Research on the life in clouds also raises the possibility that airborne organisms might exist on other planets – even ones that might seem the worst places for life to survive. Venus, for example, has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. But the clouds that blanket Venus are much cooler, and perhaps able to sustain life. Sara Seager, an astrobiologist at MIT, has speculated that life might have arisen on the surface of Venus early in its history, when it was cooler and wetter. As the planet heated up, some microbes could have found refuge in the clouds. Instead of sinking back to the surface, they may have bobbed up and down in the atmosphere, riding currents for millions of years, she says. Thinking about Seager's alien aerobiome can make cloud-gazing even more enjoyable. But when we look at clouds, Amato's research has revealed, we are also looking up at our own influence on the world. When Amato and his colleagues have surveyed the genes in the microbes they capture, they find a remarkable number that endow bacteria with resistance to antibiotics. Down on the ground, we humans have spurred the widespread evolution of these resistance genes. By taking excessive amounts of penicillin and other drugs to fight infections, we favour mutants that can withstand them. Making matters worse, farmers feed antibiotics to chickens, pigs and other livestock in order to get them to grow to bigger sizes. In 2014 alone, 700,000 people died worldwide from infections of antibiotic‑resistant bacteria. Five years later, the toll rose to 1.27 million. The evolution of antibiotic resistance occurs within the bodies of humans and the animals humans eat. The bacteria endowed with this resistance then escape their nurseries and make their way through the environment – into the soil, into streams, and it turns out, even into the air. Researchers have found high levels of resistance genes in the bacteria floating through hospitals and around pig farms. But airborne resistance genes can waft even further. An international team of scientists inspected the filters in automobile air conditioners in nineteen cities around the world. The filters had captured a rich diversity of resistant bacteria. It appears, in other words, that resistance genes float through cities. In recent years, Amato and his colleagues have charted even longer journeys. In a 2023 survey of clouds, they reported finding bacteria carrying 29 different kinds of resistance genes. A single airborne bacterium may carry as many as nine resistance genes, each providing a different defense against the drugs. Every cubic metre of cloud, they estimated, held up to 10,000 resistance genes. A typical cloud floating overhead may hold more than a trillion of them. Amato and his colleagues speculate that clouds hold such a high number of resistance genes because they can help the bacteria survive there. Some genes provide antibiotic resistance by allowing bacteria to pump the drugs out of their interiors quickly, getting rid of them before they can cause damage. The stress of life in a cloud may cause bacteria to produce toxic waste that they need to pump out quickly as well. Clouds may be able to spread these resistance genes farther than contaminated meat and water. Once in a cloud, bacteria can travel hundreds of miles in a matter of days before seeding a raindrop and falling back to Earth. When they reach the ground, the microbes may then pass along their resistance genes to other microbes they encounter. Every year, Amato and his colleagues estimate, 2.2 trillion trillion resistance genes shower down from the clouds. It is a sobering thought to hold in one's mind on a walk through the rain. We walk through downpours of DNA of our own making. * Carl Zimmer's latest book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is out now. -- For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
