nari
31-12-2004, 02:07 AM
Diane (of the Microcosmos)
Here are some excerpts from Bill Bryson's "Short history of nearly Everything"
You will be familiar with what he is saying, but the way he says it is fun.
Chapter 20 (excerpts)
...'in fact, there is no point is trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive of. if you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one million bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains -about a 100,000 of them in every square cm. of skin......you are for them the ultimate buffet, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you BO.
'And that is just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to your hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth........ a surprising number, like the ...spirochaetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you...
'.....bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
'And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes. Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes, and then split again. At such a rate, any single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in 2 days than there are protons in the universe.
"Given an adequates supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day"... (Christian de Duve).
'...bacteria share information. Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic coding from any other. Essentially, as Margules and Sagan put it, all bacteria swim in a single gene pool........it means that from a genetic point of view, bacteria have become a single super-organism - tiny, dispersed but invincible.
'....just run a damp cloth over a counter, and they will bloom as if created from nothing. They eat wood..glue in wall paper...metals....live in concentrated sulphuric acid...happily living in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors, gorging themselves on plutonium and whatever else was there...
..live 11 kilometres down in the Pacific,....survived two years on the lens of a camera that had stood on the Moon for two years....they eat rocks and live inside...600 m of solid rock...'
Bryson makes frequent references to Margules and Sagan.
No wonder they (bacteria, not M&S) rule the world..!
nari
Here are some excerpts from Bill Bryson's "Short history of nearly Everything"
You will be familiar with what he is saying, but the way he says it is fun.
Chapter 20 (excerpts)
...'in fact, there is no point is trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can't conceive of. if you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one million bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains -about a 100,000 of them in every square cm. of skin......you are for them the ultimate buffet, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you BO.
'And that is just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to your hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth........ a surprising number, like the ...spirochaetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you...
'.....bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.
'And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes. Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes, and then split again. At such a rate, any single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in 2 days than there are protons in the universe.
"Given an adequates supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day"... (Christian de Duve).
'...bacteria share information. Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic coding from any other. Essentially, as Margules and Sagan put it, all bacteria swim in a single gene pool........it means that from a genetic point of view, bacteria have become a single super-organism - tiny, dispersed but invincible.
'....just run a damp cloth over a counter, and they will bloom as if created from nothing. They eat wood..glue in wall paper...metals....live in concentrated sulphuric acid...happily living in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors, gorging themselves on plutonium and whatever else was there...
..live 11 kilometres down in the Pacific,....survived two years on the lens of a camera that had stood on the Moon for two years....they eat rocks and live inside...600 m of solid rock...'
Bryson makes frequent references to Margules and Sagan.
No wonder they (bacteria, not M&S) rule the world..!
nari