soil – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Stories filed under: "soil"
DailyDirt: The Dirt On Soil
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
If you look closely enough at nearly anything, you’re bound to find some fascinating details. With the right tools, you can see single-celled organisms are literally everywhere (and viruses are even more ubiquitous). The biodiversity of soil is obviously important to farmers, but there are other interesting things we can find out when we quantify the dirt under our feet. If you’ve ever wondered what’s in dirt, check out these links on soil.
- Soil ecologists checked out some 600 samples of dirt from Manhattan’s Central Park and discovered, surprisingly, that the soil contained almost 170,000 different kinds of microbes — a similar biodiversity to soils found in far less urban locations. These soil researchers also found about 2,000 species of microbes unique to Central Park. [url]
- Prospecting for oil by looking for certain microbes in soil samples is a technique that’s been around since the 1930s. With improving biotech, identifying microbes in oil fields could lead to faster and more accurate prospecting for energy-rich deposits. [url]
- There’s a lot of life going on in soil (aka the pedosphere) with millions to billions of microbes in each gram of dirt. Additionally, fungi, protozoa, earthworms and nematodes are hopefully thriving in healthy soil that we just see plants growing. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: biodiversity, biology, biosphere, biotech, dirt, ecology, microbes, pedosphere, soil
DailyDirt: Good Drugs Everywhere
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Concern over antibiotic resistance seems to be steadily growing, but some folks are optimistic that science will be able to develop new drugs or other kinds of medicines to replace older, increasingly ineffectual, pharmaceuticals that target the microbes in our bodies. Considering that scientists have only recently started to study the human microbiome, it’s possible that medicine could find a whole new categories of treatments that are yet undiscovered. Here are just a few links on finding drugs all around us.
- If you’ve got dirt, there might be some naturally-occurring microbes in your soil that would be useful for producing novel antibiotics or other drugs. Citizen scientists can help collect samples from all over the US, and your backyard soil could be considered a “poor man’s rainforest” when it comes to biodiversity. [url]
- Big pharma hasn’t even scratched the surface of the possible, potential medicines that could be made. It’s estimated that 1 novemdecillion “small molecule” compounds could be biologically active, and scientists have synthesized an extremely small fraction of them. [url]
- Several studies have found pharmaceuticals are turning up in drinking water treatment plants. The concentrations are typically very low, in the nanograms per liter range, but those concentrations could still have an effect on wildlife. These concentrations could also build up over time if the drugs are persistent in the environment. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: antibiotic resistance, chemistry, compounds, drinking water, drugs, health, medicine, microbiome, pharmaceuticals, soil