microorganism

Every fall, Issaquah Creek in Washington State turns into a maternity ward for thousands of salmon. The fish swim in, spawn, and die, and the water carries away their molecular traces: fragments of DNA, short-lived RNA, chemical marks on the genetic text. From September through November 2024, researchers collected a liter of water every week and ran it through a filter to catch those traces.

A swimmer in a pool filled with light balls pushes off them and swims faster than in clear water. That is roughly how a trypanosome, a single-celled parasite that causes sleeping sickness, behaves when it enters blood, where red cells occupy nearly half the volume.

Every Martian night, salt crystals on the planet's surface soak up moisture from the thin air, much like a sponge draws water from a damp cloth. By morning, a microscopic brine accumulates inside them, and during the day, as temperatures rise, that brine finds itself trapped in tiny cavities.

A thin section of eucalyptus lies under the microscope objective, and white light, passing through two polarizing filters, turns the wood into a mosaic of purple, yellow, and blue patches. These colors are not random: like letters on a map, they show the direction of the invisible cellulose threads inside the cell walls.

Life begins with a bubble. In a warm puddle on ancient Earth, fat molecules could gather into tiny spheres — prototypes of cells. Inside such a sphere, a polymer happened to be present that accelerated the uptake of new fats from the surrounding water. The bubble grew, divided, and passed its composition to offspring.

Life begins with a bubble. In a warm puddle on ancient Earth, fat molecules could gather into tiny spheres — prototypes of cells. Inside such a sphere, a polymer happened to be present that accelerated the uptake of new fats from the surrounding water. The bubble grew, divided, and passed its composition to offspring.

In any complex community, whether an orchestra or a colony of microbes, you can notice a rhythm. In the mouse gut, bacteria change their abundance every day, and for a long time it seemed they were syncing their internal clocks with the host's. But when researchers looked closely at hourly measurements, the familiar picture fell apart.

In 1970, mathematician John Conway invented the Game of Life — a cellular field where just three rules generate surprisingly complex patterns. Forty years later, SmoothLife appeared: a version where space is no longer cellular but smooth, like a blurred patch. The authors of the new study took an even simpler variant of this continuous game: now everything changes smoothly in time as well.

Imagine a packed subway car at rush hour. Passengers don't just stand there: they breathe, release moisture, squeeze toward exits, and sometimes get stuck in doors, blocking movement. Now imagine these passengers can remodel the car's walls, add handrails, or turn the floor into gel.

The search for life beyond Earth is like tuning an old radio: we listen to the chemical whisper of distant exoplanets' atmospheres, trying to pick up signs of biological activity.

In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger asked the question "What is life?", foreshadowing quantum explanations of biology. Almost a century later, physicists return to this puzzle, armed with the apparatus of quantum field theory.

The Moon is a natural archive that has been collecting cosmic dust for billions of years. Among the microscopic grains that arrived from distant stars, there could be techno-specks — particles created by alien civilizations.

When you're planning a renovation, you don't buy paint by eye: you measure the wall area. In science, deciding how many samples to collect is a similar guess, but the stakes are higher. Skimp on samples, and your study becomes a lottery: you might miss a real effect, or you might mistake noise for a discovery. Overshoot, and you're wasting tubes, months, and, in animal experiments, lives.

A microplastic particle drifts on the surface of a warm sea. Within days, invisible hitchhikers, bacteria and single-celled algae, cover it. This living film acts as ballast: the particle becomes heavier and starts to sink. In a new global model, oceanographers have for the first time tracked the fate of such "hitchhiking" plastic across the entire planet.

In murky mud, between two electrodes, long chains of bacteria line up: each one as thin as a microscopic cable. Every such filament conducts current over a full centimeter, a true marathon for a microbe.

Imagine two immiscible liquids, such as oil and water. Under normal conditions, they tend to separate, forming a clear interface. But introduce microscopic swimmers (bacteria, whose basis is carbon) and the picture changes dramatically.

The idea of extraterrestrial origin of life has long excited minds. Fred Hoyle believed bacteria travel between stars. A new study tested a similar but closer route: from Mars to Earth. In ancient times, Mars had water, and asteroid impacts knocked rocks with microbes into space.

A cell crawls over a gel (sometimes viscous, sometimes elastic) and decides on its own when to speed up. It doesn't just glide: its internal chemical motor (noise in gene expression can affect the production of 'fuel') pushes the leading edge, while the rear detaches from the substrate.

In the freshwater lakes, cyanobacteria Microcystis often cause toxic blooms. They gather into colonies — elastic little spheres, like dense jelly. The cells are glued together by a special substance based on carbon, acting as a powerful natural adhesive. Scientists tested these "jelly balls" for the first time and found their strength astonishing.

The microbial community in the gut is like an orchestra: what matters is not only the musicians but how they play together. When disease strikes, it's not just the lineup of microbes that changes: their interconnections shift too. Researchers built interaction networks of microbial genes in healthy and sick individuals.

A pot of water sits on the stove. The temperature drops: plus one degree, zero, minus one — the water stays liquid. But at some point, a light breath is enough to make the whole mass instantly freeze into ice. Physicists call such jumps first-order phase transitions.

Beneath your feet in the forest, a quiet life unfolds: fungi weave around tree roots and trade nutrients with them. But how do you count how many fungal species are in the soil without digging up the whole forest? It turns out the answer can be seen from space.

Yeast are trapped in a clear gel, like raisins in jelly. They can't move on their own, but soon they start rising to the top. The secret lies in their own homemade fizz. During fermentation, yeast release carbon dioxide. In a thick medium, the gas doesn't escape but accumulates until bubbles form.

A rock knocked off one planet by an asteroid impact hurtles through space and lands on another. If microbial spores are hiding inside, they might survive the cold, the radiation, and the rough landing. That's panspermia — the idea that life travels between worlds. But imagining such a journey is one thing; calculating every step is quite another.

E. coli is a tiny swimmer in a world where water is as thick as jelly. Inside our gut, it doesn't glide freely but fights through mucus — a tangled web of long molecules, like a ball of knotted threads.

When a crowd of bacteria (mostly composed of carbon) gathers in a droplet of water, a synchronized round dance begins: millions of tiny ones glide along giant ellipses, like dancers on a ballroom floor. Without a conductor, complex patterns emerge from simple movements.

Simple equations that describe fox and rabbit cycles have been turned to bacteria on distant exoplanets, like K2-18 b. These worlds hold deep oceans under thick hydrogen skies. Like duckweed on a pond, light-eating microbes cover the sunlit water surface, stealing light from those below.

To avoid losing a fast soccer player in the frame, a drone doesn't need a bright beacon — recognizing the silhouette is enough. Similarly, a neural network now tracks microbes: the algorithm analyzes an ordinary microscope image and instantly finds a bacterium in a drop of water.

In a thin film of water squeezed between two glass plates, bacteria live. Oxygen reaches them only through one wall, like air entering a room through a single window. When bacteria are few, they pay no attention to this: some stick to one wall, some to the other, and the picture is symmetric. But once they multiply, everything changes.

A drop of water with tiny particles dries on a table. The water evaporates, leaving the particles behind, and they arrange into a pattern, like sand after the tide. But if the particles are soft, the pattern turns out quite different. Researchers studied this process under a microscope, varying only one property of the particles: their elasticity.

Microbial communities are like a noisy orchestra: thousands of instruments, and it's hard to tell who's playing the lead. In the gut, ocean, or soil, millions of bacterial species live, and scientists need to figure out which ones truly matter for human health or soil fertility. The new approach works like smart laundry sorting.

A bacterium in a drop of water is looking for food. Around it, there's a chemical gradient: more food molecules on one side, fewer on the other. How should it move to reach the tasty spot fastest? It could steer smoothly, like a cyclist dodging a puddle. Or, like a bacterium, it could periodically stop, tumble, and swim off in a random direction.

4 billion years ago, the young Earth was mercilessly bombarded by meteorites, leaving behind impact craters. Rains filled them with water, forming shallow ponds where lipid bubbles accumulated. These bubbles, like soap bubbles but with a double-layered lipid membrane (just like modern cells), formed spontaneously when water mixed with fat-like substances.

As an embryo grows, its cells don't just divide: they constantly touch their neighbors, like people in a crowded bus. The strength of these contacts determines where a cell moves and what shape the tissue takes. Scientists studied how cell 'stickiness' changes during the earliest stages of development.

Bacteria don't just crawl across a surface: they collectively decide what shape their colony will take. Picture a crowd moving across a square: each person steps on their own, but together they form a flow. Bacteria are the same: each moves individually, but together they create patterns of branching trails. Scientists took Enterobacter sp.

A heart cell in a Petri dish contracts, and at that moment, an electrical wave sweeps across its surface. Previously, to catch that wave, you had to poke the cell with an ultra-fine electrode needle. Now, you just look at it under a microscope. The method is called electrochromic recording.

In the mud at the bottom of a pond live bacteria that carry tiny magnetic compass needles inside them. These needles are chains of magnetite crystals that help the bacteria swim along Earth's magnetic field, like a compass needle, in search of better conditions.

Dissolve a few salts and formaldehyde in a glass of water. After a while, the liquid spontaneously separates: droplets with membranes appear, like tiny bubbles. Inside each droplet, chemical transformations occur, and the droplet itself grows, absorbing material from the surrounding solution. These droplets are not just bubbles.

A drop of oil in water behaves like a tiny ball: it seeks the spot with the least energy. If a wall is nearby, the drop often sticks to it, just as a raindrop spreads on glass. In a mixture of two immiscible liquids, such as polyethylene glycol and dextran, tiny droplets of one liquid form inside the other.

A bacterium in a drop of water doesn't just swim: it probes the space around it, decides where to turn, and finds its way out of a tangled maze. Artificial microscopic swimmers haven't been able to do that until now: they had to be led by the hand, with signals sent from outside.