Twenty-seven strains of bacteria have formed a destructive blob of icicle-like "rusticles" that are slowly eating the historic wreckage of the RMS Titanic steamship.
Canadian researchers told OurAmazingPlanet that the rusticles may completely destroy the remains of the ship within 15 years. Using DNA technology, the scientists discovered a new strain of bacteria among the rusticles. They named the life-forms Halomonas titanicae.
[Fascinating facts: The novel that predicted Titanic's sinking, the cost of a ticket and more]
The ship sank in 1912. French and American expeditions found the wreckage in 1985, about 300 miles off Newfoundland, Canada. The rusticles will eventually disintegrate, and the Titanic will only be a "rust stain," researcher Henrietta Mann told OurAmazingPlanet.
[Related: Scientist outcry over NASA 'alien' discovery]
The impressively destructive new strain of bacteria has inspired us to round up some of the other news-making microorganisms of the year:
1. Oceanospirillales. Who among us could forget the kindly bacteria that began to eat away at the enormous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (according to a study published in Science)? Researchers claimed that the busy-bee microbes (dominated by the order of bacteria called Oceanospirillales) halved the amount of oil in one oil plume every three days. Still, another study that focused on a different oil plume impugned the bacteria, finding the oil was dispersing very slowly.
2. Halomonadaceae. NASA scientists found a new strain of these bacteria in the murky depths of Mono Lake, California. They claimed they trained the microbes to survive on arsenic alone, proving that life-forms do not need one of six elements thought to be essentially to life. Sadly, the peer reviews have knocked down the image of the heroic arsenic-eating microbes, with one scientist saying the science was so bad it "outraged" her.
[Related: Huge microbe community under ocean floor]
3. Escherichia coli. E.coli is better than you at sudoku. A group of University of Tokyo students programmed 16 strains of the food-borne bacteria to solve sudoku puzzles. The bacteria send information about their location on the grid and color to fellow bacteria. It's all very complicated, but this video supposedly explains it.
4. E. coli -- again! Researchers have programmed E. coli to act as "mini-computers" by inserting "logic gates" into them similar to those that computers have. "Here, we've taken a colony of bacteria that are receiving two chemical signals from their neighbors, and have created the same logic gates that form the basis of silicon computing," researcher Christopher A. Voigt said, according to an article on the SiFy News site.
http://news.yahoo.com/
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