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Bacteria power


Moontanman

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I'm going to post this here, it is a short video about bacteria movement and super fluids but I have seen something similar in real life. I used to culture euglena as a food source for rotifers, in the culture barrels the euglena would swim around and round the barrels and almost always they would all go the same direction actually making a visible current that would carry small floating particles on the surface around visibly moving at several inches a minute. These microscopic protists creating this current as long as the sun shone on them I think was similar to what is being said here.

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Interesting find. I did not believe it at first but then read these quotes:

Quote

he researchers’ setup resembled the French team’s, but an attached microscope allowed them to track the bacteria’s behavior. Sure enough, when the E. coli cocktail reached 10 to 20 percent bacteria by volume, swirls formed. As bacteria plowed through the water, which feels honey-thick at their microscopic scale, they produced shockwaves that buffeted their companions both near and far.

“It’s a bit like if you have a lot of stars in a galaxy and they can affect each other,” Dunkel said. Those forces encouraged local groups of swimming E. coli to align their pill-shaped bodies.

Then the motion of the plates makes that local behavior global. Dragging the top plate sends shearing forces rippling through the fluid, which in effect organize and orient the swarms.

“Without shear, the direction of swarming is random,” Cheng said. “Under shear, you get the tendency to have all the bacteria lining up in certain directions.”

Once the influence of the plates helps the bacteria settle into an average alignment, their swimming pushes on the water and generates local flows that transform the solution’s large-scale properties.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/swarming-bacteria-create-an-impossible-superfluid-20180726/

There is also a model stated here:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.018001

As for having a motor driven by bacteria, that need warmth and a continuous flow of suitable nutrients - dream on!

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On 1/3/2019 at 4:28 AM, jimmydasaint said:

Interesting find. I did not believe it at first but then read these quotes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/swarming-bacteria-create-an-impossible-superfluid-20180726/

There is also a model stated here:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.018001

As for having a motor driven by bacteria, that need warmth and a continuous flow of suitable nutrients - dream on!

I have my doubts as well but nutrients are in human waste and sunlight provides the warmth... 

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