Bacteria go to extremes to handle hard times: They hunker down, building a fortress-like shell around their DNA and turning off all signs of life. And yet, when times improve, these dormant spores can ...

Solving a riddle that has confounded biologists since bacterial spores — inert, sleeping bacteria — were first described more than 150 years ago, researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered ...

Scientists have demonstrated a creative solution to plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental problems. Plastic was embedded with spores of plastic-eating bacteria that are activated ...

The list of winners for this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition has finally been released, and the contest’s talented photographers once again wow viewers with fantastical images of ...

One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there’s not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that ...

A team analyzed the amino acids that affect the formation of spores in a bacterium that causes food poisoning, Clostridium perfringens, and identified serine as an amino acid that inhibits spore ...