bacteria
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Our fertilizer is killing us. Here’s a fix.
Nitrogen fertilizer is a disaster. Abandoning it would be a bigger disaster. Now a dozen billionaires are funding an alternative.
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In the future, your clothes could be made of bacteria poo
The nice way to talk about Suzanne Lee’s garments is to say that they’re “biocouture” — biodegradable clothes that required no animal products in the making. The grosser to way to talk about them is to say that they’re made of bacteria excretion. She explains: You can start with something like green tea, you add […]
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City-dwellers’ allergies are so bad because they don’t have enough bacteria
This allergy season has been terrible. It seems like everyone I know has been running around with leaky eyes, even those of us who aren’t typically pollen-sensitive. Granted, there was an unusual amount of tree sperm in the air this year, but it seemed strange that everybody — really, everybody! — was afflicted. But a […]
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Hungry bacteria help make bugs resistant to pesticides
Use pesticides on a field for long enough and the bugs that you’re supposed to be defeating will adapt. But you know what adapts faster than bugs? Bacteria. They can run through multiple generations in a day or so, and a new study shows that when bugs team up with a certain pesticide-loving bacteria, the […]