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"When animals die, waves of microbes consume their corpses. Scientists have looked at how this "necrobiome" changes over the hours and days after an animal perishes. But Saitta's work suggests that microbes continue to colonize cadavers long after their flesh has decayed, after their bones have turned to stone, and after they've been buried several miles deep for millions of years.   MORE STORIES A Dinosaur So Well Preserved, It Looks Like a Statue ED YONG How a Fossil Can Reveal the Color of a Dinosaur CARI ROMM The Counterintuitive Way That Microbes Survive in Antarctica ED YONG The Scientist Who Stumbled Upon a Tick Full of 20-Million-Year-Old Blood SARAH ZHANG That came as a huge surprise to Tullis Onstott, a microbiologist from Princeton who worked with Saitta, and who always thought of fossils as inert and inanimate. "I thought that dinosaur bone must be some kind of sealed sarcophagus," he says. "It's not, by any means. It's basically a condo for bacteria. Now the question becomes: Is this true for all dinosaur bones?""

A sweeping effort to map a hospital's microorganisms has found that infectious pathogens hide in a place that's all about cleaning: the sink. Niranjan Nagarajan at the Genome Institute of Singapore and his colleagues sampled bacteria from bed rails, sinks and other sites in a Singapore hospital. Microbes that tend to grow in slimy 'biofilms' and cause hospital-acquired infections were prevalent on sink traps and faucet aerators, whereas skin-dwelling bacteria were abundant on objects, such as door knobs and bed rails, that are often touched. Frequently touched sites harboured multidrug-resistant microbes such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which might persist in the hospital environment for more than eight years, the team suggested.

A Purdue University-led team of scientists has evidence that tomatoes may be more sensitive to these types of diseases because they've lost the protection offered by certain soil microbes. The researchers found that wild relatives and wild-type tomatoes that associate more strongly with a positive soil fungus grew larger, resisted disease onset and fought disease much better than modern plants.

But when cognitive science turned its back on behaviourism more than 50 years ago and began dealing with signals and internal maps, goals and expectations, beliefs and desires, biologists were torn. All right, they conceded, people and some animals have minds; their brains are physical minds - not mysterious dualistic minds - processing information and guiding purposeful behaviour; animals without brains, such as sea squirts, don't have minds, nor do plants or fungi or microbes. They resisted introducing intentional idioms into their theoretical work, except as useful metaphors when teaching or explaining to lay audiences. Genes weren't really selfish, antibodies weren't really seeking, cells weren't really figuring out where they were. These little biological mechanisms weren't really agents with agendas, even though thinking of them as if they were often led to insights.

]. "The narrow strip of soil around the plant's root teems with millions of microorganisms, making it one of the most complex ecosystems on earth. To determine whether the composition of this "root microbiome" triggers changes within the plant, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elisa Korenblum and other members of a team headed by Prof. Asaph Aharoni of Weizmann's Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, created a hydroponic set-up in which they split the roots of tomato seedlings in two. In a series of experiments, the researchers placed one side of the split roots in vials, progressively diluting the soil suspensions several times. Each dilution altered the soil's microbial composition and reduced the diversity within the microbial community, so that the different suspensions ended up containing root microbiomes with high, medium and low diversity levels. The other side of the roots was submerged in a vial with a clean, soil-free solution. If the soil microbes communicate with the plant, one would expect to detect signs of their messages on both sides of the root system. That was exactly what the scientists found…. 'Our ultimate goal is to decipher the chemical language - one could call it 'Plantish' - used by plants and the soil to interact with one another,' Korenblum