Technology
Editor’s Note: Got soft skills?
In his “All About You” column this month, our friend Richard Hawk gives advice for having good c
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2023-09-25 01:00:38
My Story: Jade Nelson
As a safety professional, I can attest to the fact that choosing safety as a career is one of the mo
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2023-09-25 01:00:38
‘Nearly always preventable’: Help workers avoi
From the blare of a forklift-collision warning to the wail of an ambulance siren, noise can make us
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2023-09-25 01:00:37
Workplace fire safety: What’s your plan?
If a fire broke out at your workplace, would workers know what to do? Do they know what procedures t
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2023-09-25 01:00:37
The Secret of How Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the worldâs oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent most of the planetâs microbial mass and whose diversity may exceed that of surface-dwelling life forms. Their existence comes with a great puzzle: Researchers have often assumed that many of those subterranean realms are oxygen-deficient dead zones inhabited only by primitive microbes keeping their metabolisms at a crawl and scraping by on traces of nutrients. As those resources get depleted, it was thought, the underground environment must become lifeless with greater depth.In new research published in June in Nature Communications, researchers presented evidence that challenges those assumptions. In groundwater reservoirs 200 meters below the fossil fuel fields of Alberta, Canada, they discovered abundant microbes that produce unexpectedly large amounts of oxygen even in the absence of light. The microbes generate and release so much of what the researchers call âdark oxygenâ that itâs like discovering âthe scale of oxygen coming from the photosynthesis in the Amazon rainforest,â said Karen Lloyd, a subsurface microbiologist at the University of Tennessee who was not part of the study. The quantity of the gas diffusing out of the cells is so great
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2023-09-25 01:00:40Featured Ads

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