Bacteria are about as different from viruses as metronomes are from giraffes.
Every year, a thousand letters arrive in Jerusalem addressed to God.
Uranium is 40 times more common than silver and 500 times more common than gold.
The giant palm salamander can stick its tongue out 50 times faster than you can blink.
Every day, the human body makes 300 billion new cells, three times as many as there are galaxies in the universe.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
Big organisms
1 billion years ago?
For the first time, life was not just made up of single cells. Now cells were teaming up to form larger organisms with things like mouths, limbs and sense organs. It’s hard to say when this happened: there are fossils of large organisms dating back 2.1 billion years, but these may simply have been colonies of bacteria. Different groups of organisms probably evolved multicellularity independently, with plants managing it before animals.
See other: History of Life
Complex cells
2-1 billion years ago
The first organisms were simple cells like modern bacteria, but some of them became much more internally complex. These ‘eukaryotes’ developed lots of specialised equipment within their cells. They also had a new source of energy: sausage-shaped objects called mitochondria that were once free-living bacteria, but which were absorbed in a process called endosymbiosis. Every animal and plant you have ever seen is a eukaryote.
See other: History of Life
Whoever came up with five-second rule had probably just dropped an entire cookie on the ground and needed a sanitary excuse to save it. However, according to research from Clemson University, such a cookie could have picked up toxic salmonella bacteria during that brief time window, especially on a tiled or wooden surface.
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
Having said that, different foods produce a smorgasbord of results. Comparing the bacteria colonies picked up by dry saltines and wet pastrami after the sodium-rich snacks hung out on a contaminated floor for a few seconds, moist sausage tends to pick up far more flora.
Even food that has spent a mere two seconds on a contaminated surface can be considered suspect. The “five-second rule” seems to be a juvenile fiction. In fact, even if something spends a mere millisecond on the floor, it attracts bacteria. How dirty it gets depends on the food’s moisture, surface geometry and floor condition – not time.
Sad news for clumsy eaters and students everywhere: the “five-second rule” is a myth.
“You could also ask who’s in charge. Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
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