How do microorganisms reach the stratosphere?

A number of studies have demonstrated that bacteria and fungi are present in the stratosphere. Since the tropopause is generally regarded as a barrier to the upward movement of particles it is difficult to see how such microorganisms can reach heights above 17 km. Volcanoes provide an obvious means by which this could be achieved, but these occur infrequently and any microorganisms entering the stratosphere from this source will rapidly fall out of the stratosphere. Here, we suggest mechanisms by which microorganisms might reach the stratosphere on a more regular basis; such mechanisms are, however, likely only to explain how micrometre to submicrometre particles could be elevated into the stratosphere. Intriguingly, clumps of bacteria of size in excess of 10 μm have been found in stratospheric samples. It is difficult to understand how such clumps could be ejected from the Earth to this height, suggesting that such bacterial masses may be incoming to Earth. We suggest that the stratospheric microflora is made up of two components: (a) a mixed population of bacteria and fungi derived from Earth, which can occasionally be cultured; and (b) a population made up of clumps of, viable but non-culturable, bacteria which are too large to have originated from Earth; these, we suggest, have arrived in the stratosphere from space. Finally, we speculate on the possibility that the transfer of bacteria from the Earth to the highly mutagenic stratosphere may have played a role in bacterial evolution

Cosmic Needles versus Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

It has been suggested by a number of authors that the 2.7K cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation might have arisen from the radiation from Population III objects thermalized by conducting cosmic graphite/iron needle-shaped dust. Due to lack of an accurate solution to the absorption properties of exceedingly elongated grains, in existing literature which studies the CMB thermalizing process they are generally modelled as (1) needle-like spheroids in terms of the Rayleigh approximation; (2) infinite cylinders; and (3) the antenna theory. We show here that the Rayleigh approximation is not valid since the Rayleigh criterion is not satisfied for highly conducting needles. We also show that the available intergalactic iron dust, if modelled as infinite cylinders, is not sufficient to supply the required opacity at long wavelengths to obtain the observed isotropy and Planckian nature of the CMB. If appealing to the antenna theory, conducting iron needles with exceedingly large elongations (10^4) appear able to provide sufficient opacity to thermalize the CMB within the iron density limit. But the applicability of the antenna theory to exceedingly thin needles of nanometer/micrometer in thickness needs to be justified.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures; submitted to ApJ

Did silicon aid in the establishment of the first bacterium?

Silicic acid increased numbers of both aerobic and facultatively anaerobic bacteria in ultrapure water incubated under strict oligotrophic conditions; soil extracts acted as the bacterial inoculum. The results are discussed in relation to the possibility that silicic acid, produced by the hydrolysis of silicates on the early Earth, could have stimulated the growth of the first bacterium, thereby allowing it to become established in the then prevailing conditions (presumed to be oligotrophic)

Confirmation of the presence of viable but non-cultureable bacteria in the stratosphere

The presence of viable, but non-cultureable, bacteria on membranes through which stratospheric air samples were passed has been confirmed using viable fluorescent staining

Unscrambling Structured Chirality with Structured Light at the Nanoscale Using Photoinduced Force

We show that the gradient force generated by the near field of a chiral nanoparticle carries information about its chirality. On the basis of this physical phenomenon we propose a new microscopy technique that enables the prediction of spatial features of chirality of nanoscale samples by exploiting the photoinduced optical force exerted on an achiral tip in the vicinity of the test specimen. The tip-sample interactive system is illuminated by structured light to probe both the transverse and longitudinal (with respect to the beam propagation direction) components of the sample's magnetoelectric polarizability as the manifestation of its sense of handedness, i.e., chirality. We specifically prove that although circularly polarized waves are adequate to detect the transverse polarizability components of the sample, they are unable to probe the longitudinal component. To overcome this inadequacy and probe the longitudinal chirality, we propose a judiciously engineered combination of radially and azimuthally polarized beams as optical vortices possessing pure longitudinal electric and magnetic field components along their vortex axis, respectively. The proposed technique may benefit branches of science such as stereochemistry, biomedicine, physical and material science, and pharmaceutics

Enantiospecific Detection of Chiral Nanosamples Using Photoinduced Force

We propose a high-resolution microscopy technique for enantiospecific detection of chiral samples down to sub-100-nm size based on force measurement. We delve into the differential photoinduced optical force ΔF exerted on an achiral probe in the vicinity of a chiral sample when left and right circularly polarized beams separately excite the sample-probe interactive system. We analytically prove that ΔF is entangled with the enantiomer type of the sample enabling enantiospecific detection of chiral inclusions. Moreover, we demonstrate that ΔF is linearly dependent on both the chiral response of the sample and the electric response of the tip and is inversely related to the quartic power of probe-sample distance. We provide physical insight into the transfer of optical activity from the chiral sample to the achiral tip based on a rigorous analytical approach. We support our theoretical achievements by several numerical examples highlighting the potential application of the derived analytic properties. Lastly, we demonstrate the sensitivity of our method to enantiospecify nanoscale chiral samples with chirality parameter on the order of 0.01 and discuss how the sensitivity of our proposed technique can be further improved