Legumes like soybeans, alfalfa, peas, beans, peanuts and many more have a remarkable ability: They can partner with soil ...

In every backyard, park, and playground on Earth, the ground is teeming with a type of bacteria called Streptomyces—one of the most abundant organisms on the planet. While these dirt-dwelling microbes ...

Sugars contained exclusively in breast milk are helping to feed an important balance of bacteria in babies’ developing gut microbiomes, a new study has found. In a paper published in Nature ...

Every jar of honey is a chemical archive of the flowers a bee visited and the season it lived through. This week, on Climate ...

Acid-filled pitchers complete with fangs. Labyrinthine chambers decorated with bristles. Leaves that snap shut in less than a ...

Scientists have identified a new class of insect-killing proteins, dubbed Streptomyces antiquus insecticidal proteins (SAIPs), in a common soil bacterium. Dating back over 100 million years, these ...

Famously studied by Charles Darwin, the Galápagos Islands lie in the Pacific Ocean 600 miles west of Ecuador. They are rich ...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa -- an environmental bacteria that can cause devastating multidrug-resistant infections, particularly in people with underlying lung conditions -- evolved rapidly and then spread ...

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with States Newsroom. It is part of the Grist series Vital Signs, exploring the ways climate change affects your health. This reporting initiative is ...