When I saw this painting, I got tears in my eyes. Seriously.

I just love this. I think it’s the angles; the 3/4 turn of the grandmother and baby, the look of absorption on the baby’s face, and the semi-gibbous phase of the Earth.

And, of course, the sentiment. You can read a lot into this painting. But isn’t that what art is for?

This work is by Chase Stone, who has a lot of amazing art posted on DeviantArt. I strongly recommend going through his stuff.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Reddit.

Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don’t know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you’ll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read its sequence, you’ll discover an astonishing diversity of genes belonging to those microbes–thousands in a single spoon of soil. But now try to rear those microbes in a lab. When scientists try, they generally fail. A tiny fraction of one percent of microbe species will grow under ordinary conditions in Petri dish.

This staggering difficulty is the reason why E. coli and a few other species became the laboratory darlings of biologists during the 1900s. As I write in Microcosm, E. coli will happily explode in a flask full of broth. As a result, a lot of what we know about life we know from E. coli. Certainly a lot of those lessons hold true for any species–genes encoded in DNA, DNA used to produce RNA and proteins, a genetic code, and so on. But there are a lot of microbes that are very unlike E. coli. Even in our gut, for example, E. coli is just a minor player in an ecosystem made up of hundreds or thousands of species. Yet we know relatively little about its neighbors.

One reason for the trouble we have in raising microbes is that the environment we like is not the environment a lot of them like. If you are feeding on minerals in boiling water at the bottom of the ocean, it’s possible that you might find life in a luke-warm flask in an oxygen-rich atmosphere at sea-level air pressure unbearable–perhaps even toxic.

But the physical surroundings of microbes can’t account for all the trouble they pose for would-be microbial zoo-keepers. If you scoop up some wet sand from a pleasant beach, you will still be hard-pressed to get more than a few species to grow in the lab.

To coax bacteria to grow, microbiologists have been upgrading their Petri dishes. They have been building cages that mimic the natural habitat of the bacteria, and in some cases taking their chambers out of the lab and putting them in the environments where the bacteria live.

These semi-wild chambers have brought scientists more success, and they’ve also helped scientists figure out why the microbes are so hard to grow in the first place. Along with the right physical conditions, microbes need to live alongside the right microbes.

In the new issue of Chemistry and Biology, Tony d’Onofrio of Harvard and his colleagues report a striking success in cultivating bacteria that were previously impossible to cultivate. They made their discovery while studying some bacteria that live on a beach near Boston. Some of the bacteria, while unable to grow on their own in a Petri dish, grew if they were near certain other species. Perhaps, the scientists speculated, the hard-to-grow bacteria depended on something the other species made.

The scientists tested different molecules made by bacteria to see if any of them were fostering the growth. They eventually figured out that the responsible molecule was something known as a siderophore. Some species of bacteria make siderophores as a way to get their minimal daily required does of iron. Iron is essential for the growth of cells, but in many environments free iron is in short supply. So bacteria make iron-trapping molecules–siderophores–and release them through special channels. The siderophores drift around, and sometimes manage to snag iron atoms. They fold up around the iron, assuming a shape that allows them to slip through other channels back into the bacteria. Once inside, they open up again and set their iron free.

It turns out that a lot of species on the beaches around Boston–and presumably in a lot of other places in the world–don’t make their own siderophores. Instead, they rely on other species to produce siderophores, and once those molecules swallow up the iron, the bacteria that don’t make siderophores snatch them up. The scientists found that with different kinds of siderophores made by different species of bacteria, they could suddenly get a lot of microbes to grow.

Discoveries like these are exciting both in a practical and intellectual way. We’ve already harvested lots of valuable molecules from microbes, such as antibiotics and gene-copying enzymes. If scientists can raise lots of new species of microbes, they may be able to find new molecules. But the result is fascinating in itself. Apparently, a lot of microbial species depend on the kindness of strangers. And apparently, there are bacteria out there that are churning out siderophores despite the fact that other species are slurping up the iron they forage. If that was all there was to the story, this would not be a situation that could last long. The cheaters would thrive by skipping the effort of making siderophores, and eventually there wouldn’t be enough honest bacteria left to keep all the microbes supplied with their iron. It’s likely, instead, that the cheaters are not cheaters at all, but rather have services of their own to offer the microbial community.

And so the reason that we know so little about life on Earth may be that we have yet to figure out the complicated social life of microbes.

This spring, many beekeepers across America opened their hives and found ruin within. At a time when they should have been buzzing with activity, the hives were half-empty, with most adult bees having flown off to die. A new federal survey indicates that 2010 has been the worst year so far for bee deaths. Another study suggests that pesticides might be to blame for the mass wipeout of adult honeybees.

This winter’s die-off was the continuation of a four-year trend. At any given point, beekeepers can expect to see 15 to 20 percent of their bees wiped out due to natural causes or harsh weather. But this alarming phenomenon, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD), has seen millions of bees perish in a mysterious epidemic, with some farmers losing 30 to 90 percent of their hives.

As for the cause of this epidemic, experts say their best guess is that many factors are combining to sicken bees, with the list of culprits including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, and pesticides. Now a new study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE strengthens the case for pesticides’ culpability.

In the study, researchers found about three out of five pollen and wax samples from 23 states had at least one systemic pesticide — a chemical designed to spread throughout all parts of a plant [AP]. The scientists say that in the 887 wax, pollen, bee, and hive samples, they found 121 different types of pesticides. The pesticides weren’t present in sufficient quantities to kill the bees, they say, but when combined with the other detrimental factors the mix could prove lethal for the tiny workers.

This is the fourth year of honey bee losses across the United States. In 2007, the nation’s beekeepers lost 32 percent of their colonies. In 2008 they lost 36 percent. In 2009, 29 percent [Discovery News]. With the official 2010 numbers (which will be announced in April) expected to be even worse, farmers across the United States are worried. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini [AP]. Almond growers in California are particularly concerned; the state is one of the largest producers of almonds in the world, and with the decline in the bee population, pollinating the trees has been a challenge. CCD has also dealt a tough economic blow to the beekeepers who truck their hives to the orchards. For Zac Browning, one of the country’s largest commercial beekeepers, the latest woes have led to a $1 million loss this year [AP].

As federal, state, and private agencies hunt for the elusive bee killer, the USDA has advised people not to use pesticides indiscriminately—especially at midday when honey bees are most likely out foraging for nectar. The agency is also asking people to plant and encourage the planting of good nectar sources like red clover, foxglove, bee balm, and joe-pye weed to give the besieged honey bees a boost.

Related Content:
80beats: Honeybee Murder Mystery: “We Found the Bullet Hole,” Not the “Smoking Gun”
80beats: Are Reports of a Global Honeybee Crisis Overblown?
80beats: Honeybee Killer Still at Large
DISCOVER: The Baffling Bee Die-Off Continues
DISCOVER: Beepocalypse

Image: Flickr / Todd Huffman

The Kennecott Garfield Smelter of the Bingham Canyon Mine is located 17 miles west of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. It sits between the south shore of the Great Salt Lake and the Oquirrh Mountains. As the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River, the Kennecott stack rises 1,215 feet from a 124-foot-diameter base. The Bingham Canyon Mine, owned by global mining giant Rio Tinto, has the distinction of being the biggest man-made excavation on the face of the earth, daily producing 150,000 tons of copper ore and 270,000 tons of “overburden.” Called “The Richest Hole on Earth,” it is nearly a mile deep and about three miles wide at the top, and still expanding.

As photographer Michael Light points out, if you look closely at this photograph, you will see the beach of the prehistoric freshwater Lake Bonneville, behind the top half of the stack, to the left. Shooting from the open side of a helicopter, with nothing between him and the void but a lap belt, Light was in the air for about two hours, shooting some 450 exposures using a large format aerial camera loaded with 5” roll film. “Photographing Bingham Canyon is an act of looking at one geological epoch precisely as it merges into another, the Holocene becoming the Anthropocene,” writes Light.

Garfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains, and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake.

All images are by Michael Light, courtesy Radius Books/Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

There are aliens among us!

Don’t believe me? Then gaze upon this picture, O Foolish Human:

BABloggee Jeremy Theriot sent this picture to me. It looks innocent, doesn’t it? Ah, certainly, until you see it from a different angle…

J’accuse! Obviously, they walk among us! Or, more accurately, they are rooted among us. If prickly pear cacti have roots. I think they do. Yeah, let’s assume they do.

So maybe they’re not a major threat, but have you ever seen one up close? I’m positive I don’t want one probing me, I assure you. There’s a reason they’re prickly…

P.S. This one provides even more evidence that they photosynthesize among us.

After six months in the International Space Station, two astronauts, a Russian and an American, returned to earth on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 in the Soyuz TMZ-16. The Soyuz dropped into four feet of snow in a remote region of Kazakhstan. NASA photographer Bill Ingalls, who has been shooting for NASA since 1991, says that one of the hardest parts of shooting a landing is trying to catch the rockets on the spacecraft that are supposed to fire milliseconds prior to landing, in order to cushion it. Ingalls arrived in the first group of recovery helicopters on the scene that circle the landing zone. The same snow that blocked the ground recovery vehicles from reaching the Soyuz also made it difficult for Ingalls to tell how high above the ground the it was, and when the rockets would fire.

He shot at a high shutter speed using motor drive to capture it all. Ingalls had made his shot, but for the astronauts, the journey was hardly over. Coming all the way from outer space back to earth is only part of the commute from the Space Station. After recovery from the snow at the landing site near Arkalyk, these hardy spacemen then traveled two and a half hours by helicopter to Kustanay, Kazakhstan. There they participated in a ceremony at the airport, where the locals presented them with traditional hats. Then they hopped on a plane for another two and a half hour ride before finally coming to rest at Star City, outside of Moscow.

Image courtesy Bill Ingalls/NASA

Today Discover gains two new bloggers: Razib Khan and Ed Yong. But while they’re new to Discover, they’re far from new to the science blogosphere. I’m a long time reader of both of their blogs, and urge everyone to check them out, too. Welcome!