Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover aerospace, astronomy & hosted The Cosmic Controversy Podcast. Photograph showing the cracks in Saturn s moon, Enceladus, ...

Bacteria go to extremes to handle hard times: They hunker down, building a fortress-like shell around their DNA and turning off all signs of life. And yet, when times improve, these dormant spores can ...

Getting microbes to eat plastic is a frequently touted solution to our growing waste problem, but making the approach practical is tricky. A new technique that impregnates plastic with the spores of ...

Scientists have demonstrated a creative solution to plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental problems. Plastic was embedded with spores of plastic-eating bacteria that are activated ...

(Nanowerk News) Bacterial spores are one of nature’s most resilient organisms. These tiny, seed-like structures form when bacteria enter a dormant state to survive unfavorable conditions. They can ...

"Remove the Kapton tape and activate the battery." "But captain, these batteries must be 100 years old!" "They'll work, trust me." That may sound like a scene from a Star Trek rerun, but it could ...

Bacterial spores can survive for years, even centuries, without nutrients, resisting heat, UV radiation, and antibiotics. How inert, sleeping bacteria -- or spores -- spring back to life has been a ...

A bacterium already famous for shrugging off extreme radiation and desiccation has now passed another brutal test: surviving ...

Gürol Süel points to an oval image on a large screen. It’s a video of a spore that periodically changes color. “It’s counting every time it encounters food. It’s summing those signals and it gets ...

Researchers led by a team at the University of California San Diego have developed a biodegradable form of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) that could help reduce the plastic industry’s environmental ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...