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The last-minute repairs, friendly competition, racing out to the track to get in that last run that might just be the one—that’s all over. And the dancing of the “Electric Slide” in the awards banquet hall has begun.

It was an up-and-down day. Penn State’s hydrogen fuel cell, HFV, drove like a champ and achieved the equivalent of 1,803 miles per gallon. But they couldn’t quite claim the number one spot. “We kept going back and forth with Cicero” says team member John Bearer, referring to the fuel cell champion Cicero North-Syracuse High School. Bearer wasn’t too disappointed, though, as the competition is far from cutthroat: At the very end, Northern Arizona gave up its final spot in line to Cal Poly, whose crew yearned to take a last shot at a better mileage number.

The fuel cell car from Missouri, however, never managed to finish the 10-lap race and get a number on the board. They were on pace for 300 MPG equivalency, but halfway through runs, the computer system registered errors and the car shut down. In a nice nod, though, the Tigers took home the “perseverance in the face of adversity” award.

Canadian team Université Laval won the overall prize for all the cars, excluding solar, with 2,488 MPG. One of the cars by team Rose-Hulman, who we profiled earlier, won third in prototype combustion engines with just more than 1,800 MPG. But the Purdue Polaris, which we profiled yesterday, achieved a best result of 4,548 MPG equivalency. It also took home the People’s Choice Award with nearly 100,000 votes, and the design and communication awards.

You can see all the results here. And tomorrow we’ll be bringing you a slideshow of the best images from Shell Eco-marathon 2010.

These Shell Eco-marathon cars are aiming for ultra-high mileage, so to be frank, driver comfort takes the backseat. Or, rather, it would if these cars had a backseat.

Having a car come high up off the ground raises air resistance, so the prototypes are low and sleek. Blaine Castongia of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, whose transparent car in seen here, says suspension gets the ax, too: It’s just wasted energy.

As a result, Rose-Hulman drivers Bethany Brisco and Barbara Arrowsling get a rough ride. The steering controls are right by their hips, so moving right or left means swaying one’s hips out of the way to make room. The two women say it’s easy to see where they’re going despite the low angle, unless they’re sitting still.

What’s not easy, they say, are the race conditions. The team is accustomed to testing its cars on closed courses with smooth surfaces. This year’s Shell Eco-marathon, however, forces them to drive the on Houston streets, which can be a little unpleasant even if you had suspension and were more than a few inches off the ground. The two Rose-Hulman drivers also say that racing with other cars on the track reflects more of the haphazard nature of real driving. You might have a desired route in mind to reduce mileage, but if another car cuts you off and forces you outside, too bad.

Danica Patrick caused a flurry of excitement when she entered the high ranks of professional racing, but here at the eco-marathon, female drivers are the norm. Women get the glamor spot in the cockpit of many if not most of the cars, as teams seek to reduce as much weight as possible.

So Brisco and Arrowsling are the ones putting Rose-Hulman’s driving strategy in place. The team’s two cars, running on lawn string trimmer’s engines and using only 15 mL of fuel per run, are among the best in the field. One has exceeded 1,800 MPG. Castongia says he hopes to break the team’s own record of 1,972 MPG, though that might be a long shot. With another 20 MPG in the afternoon run, though, Rose-Hulman could break back into second place.

If they get better, the drivers probably deserve the thanks. Louisiana Tech driver Joseph Nealy says he got the team’s blue car up from 173 MPG to 251 by using a better driving strategy: ditching the preconceived plan of when to accelerate, and ignoring the speedometer, which lags a few seconds behind anyway. “This time it was driven completely by ear,” he says.

Racing finishes in the late afternoon. We’ll keep you updated when the final scores come in.

Time is short. Only two windows of urban concept racing time remain, and though Louisiana Tech’s last run in its blue car jumped the score from 173 miles per gallon up to 251, they still lag behind leader Mater Dei High School of Evansville, Indiana. So it’s time to pull out all the stops.

In the “garage,” Tech crew members count down the time until they must be back out on the track. In the waning minutes, crew member Beau Downey tells me all they can do to try to close the gap on the MPG leaders is streamline how air flows around the car. First, he says, they’re trying to smooth out the car’s undertray. While the overall carbon fiber body cuts through the air nicely, he thinks the air coming under the car gets caught and causes drag.

Louisiana Tech has sheets of plastic they brought down in case they needed to redo the car’s tinted windows. But in these last few moments it’s time to forget about that and cut the sheets into shells that cover the wheel wells, with the idea that passing air won’t be able to get in there, either.

Missouri, too, is feeling the heat. As we mentioned in our first post yesterday, the Tigers had quite an ordeal just getting a working car to Houston. During test runs yesterday, however, a connection came loose after just five of the 1o laps. Back in the shop, they’ve found the faulty connection, and race to repair so they can hit the road this afternoon and get a score on the board before competition ends in the evening.

Given that they make up 40 of the 50 cars in the fields, the vehicles in the prototype category ruled the road course here Houston for much of yesterday. But as day one rolled on, the urban concept cars—which look a little less like futuristic bobsleds on wheels and little more like what you’d recognize as a car—cruised around the track.

The car above is Concept Zero, by the crew from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. (They’d be DISCOVER’s home team, as we’re based in New York.) Team members Jonathan Sorocki and Michael Choi say that besides the challenge of trying to build their own car within the span of just months, they ran into another problem: They weren’t allowed to weld on campus.

As it turned out, that minus became a plus. With some funding from Time Warner and Nordan Composites, Sorocki and Choi’s team built Concept Zero from carbon fiber. With only one weld in the car, it weighs in at a slim 227 pounds, Sorocki says, and much of that weight comes from the swank rims they procured from Vespa Soho in Manhattan. Thus, despite the fact that Concept Zero isn’t much smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, it putters around the track powered by a 1.1 horsepower engine.

NYU made a full run with 144 MPG yesterday. However, shortly thereafter the axle shifted and the disc brake started rubbing against other parts. After a night of little sleep and spare part runs to Home Depot, the car is back together and the crew is shooting for 200 MPG today. And if they don’t win any mileage awards, the team members have their other bases covered: NYU is the most active team lobbying for the people’s choice award. That piece of paper you see on the window lists texting instructions for voting.

At the other end of the funding spectrum lies Durand High, the ethanol-powered Wisconsinites we covered yesterday. After the team repaired the bent bike wheels that car #50 suffered in a morning accident, the vehicle—which contains less than $1,000 of materials and runs on a 5.5 HP Honda engine donated to the school eight years ago—cruised to a 345 MPG run yesterday. Now coach Bill Rieger says the team plans to let the driver give a little more fuel in bursts and do more coasting, to see if strategy can get them up to 500 MPG.

Durand’s 5.5 HP is more than most teams brought to the Shell Eco-marathon, so it’s worth a shot. “We got overkill,” Rieger says. “We’re going to dig in today.”

The fourth-to-last Space Shuttle launch has been scheduled by NASA for April 5. Discovery will be on a 13 day mission to the space station, where it will bring various supplies and swap out some station hardware. Discovery will be using the Leonardo multi-purpose logistics module to carry those supplies.

The launch is planned for 06:21 EDT (10:21 GMT), so the sky will still be relatively dark but getting lighter (sunrise is a little after 07:00). It should be very pretty!

Thanks to artist Samantha Brooke for contributing this week’s stunning watercolor to The Science of Kissing Gallery featuring affectionate behavior among giraffes. Submit your original photograph or artwork for consideration by emailing me at [email protected].

The Atavism put together a nice picture showing how the X-woman’s DNA could just be plain old Neanderthal genes. I’ve shamelessly stolen it for my own post.

Race day one is almost done here in Houston, and the college and high school engineers are starting to surmount the technical difficulties and put up extraordinary numbers with their cars.

When we last left Durand High School, the team’s ethanol-powered car had swiped another vehicle around turn one and wrecked. But the car got back on the road, and the team recorded two full runs, including one of 345 miles per gallon. Three of the cars in the fuel cell category scored more than the equivalent of 1,000 MPG. And the girls from Granite Falls High School got as high as 182 MPG in the pink-and-green diesel “Iron Maiden.”

Tomorrow: How you drive these crazy things, how you build a car when your college forbids welding, and the final tallies from Shell Eco-marathon Americas.

As we saw this morning, just taking a vehicle designed strictly with mileage in mind and getting it around a track 10 times in no easy task. Grand Rapids High School, who we covered this morning, saw their car “The World’s Fastest Indian” bottom out over a bump near the final turn and grind to a halt. As of this moment the team had gone through an emergency session in the garage—which is actually a huge room in the convention center littered with tools and frantic young engineers—and headed out to try it again.

The key, says coach Michael Werner of Granite Falls High School in Washington state, is to just get on the board. The two-seater diesel his boys’ team built managed to chauffeur Shell’s Marvin Odum on a tour of the track, but thereafter suffered some transmission problems. The girls’ team had their aptly-named “Iron Maiden” roadster on the way to a successful run this morning when it threw a chain. “I think we’re on Plan E, F, or maybe G,” Werner says.

But fortune turned for Granite Falls, and this afternoon the girls finished all 10 laps around the downtown Houston track, erupting in a chorus of cheers as the car pulled in to have its fuel mileage measured by Shell volunteers. Werner says he told them to forget the mileage and just get the car over the line. Once you get a number on the board, he says, it’s there, whether it’s 50, 100, or 200 mpg.

Now that Granite Falls has a score, the girls plan to drive with a little more strategy, tweaking their fuel use to go for a big number. Many of the other drivers that have already completed a successful lap or two have begun to figure out the course, giving the engine a burn at the start of the home stretch and coasting the rest of the way to save gas, and staying tight through the backside turns.

Even if the team misses its mileage goals, Werner says they’ll be strong in the other competitions, like ergonomics or safety. “They’re as comfortable as you can be in a sardine can,” he says of the drivers. Now he just needs to get the boys’ team on the board, which may take a little more garage time, and some motivation. “We’ll be out here, with the successful ones,” he teased one of the boys headed inside for continued repairs.

Not so long ago, the Purdue University solar car team was competing in the American Solar Challenge, an endurance race spanning more than 1,000 miles. The Shell Eco-marathon here in Houston is a totally different animal, however, requiring just 10 short track laps but asking the utmost in fuel efficiency. That sent the Purdue team back to the shop.

Pulsar, the team’s prototype entry here, is a scaled-down version of the long-distance Spot II. “We don’t have the nice long curvature,” team member Joe Trefilek tells me about the body design. While the motor and body size are both reduced, Shell adds the requirement that the solar entrants produce more energy than they consume.

Pulsar’s broad top covered in solar panels make it stick out like a sore thumb in the prototype category, which is mostly populated by sleek and small gas-powered cars stripped down to the bare minimum to maximize mileage. But while Pulsar is slightly less concerned with aerodynamics, it’s more at the mercy of the weather.

Before the race, Trefilek says, the team made computer maps of how shadows cast by the tall hotels and office buildings in downtown Houston would fall on the track to see how the driver might need to balance the energy load. He says the team wondered, “Would we have to go faster in the shade, and slower in the sun?” Thankfully, the sun shined steadily here this morning.

To compete head-to-head with the other energy sources, solar cars have to compare their energy use to the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline and do the math. Trefilek says Purdue made two solid runs this morning, and while official word from Shell hasn’t come down, he says Pulsar’s on-board meter showed they’d reached the equivalent of 4,400 mpg.

This afternoon the urban concept division of cars hits the track. There are far fewer of these, because the idea is that they be much closer to a street legal car. For next year, Purdue wants to make a hybrid of its solar cars and build something for the urban concept division.

Besides the slew of large universities, there’s also a contingent of plucky high school teams competing here at the Eco-marathon. Though for some the first morning has been a struggle.

Tiny Durand High School from Wisconsin boats the only ethanol vehicle in the field. But it wasn’t the engine that kept them from completing the course. With another car on the right, Durand’s driver got too close to the inside curb on turn one and clipped it, then the other car, leaving both of them stuck.

For Durand coach Bill Rieger, it was a heartbreaker. “I want to cry right now,” he said, because the team was so close to putting results on the board. Once the car completes 10 laps, race officials make the official mileage measurements. But Durand’s #50 car completed only 7, and there are no pro-rated mesasurements. The 50 car is custom-built, so it won’t be an easy fix to get it ready for the later trial runs. “We need to find a bike shop and see if we can bend our spindles back,” Rieger says.

Hope isn’t lost: the students from Grand Rapids High School in Minnesota tell DISCOVER that despite the competition, the teams help each other out. Still, the high school students want badly to succeed, and especially out-do the college team. Grand Rapids took 7th overall last year. This year started slower for them, as their morning session run made only a single lap. But their still hopeful, saying the new gasoline engine this year could achieve 700 miles per gallon.

Corey writes, “I got this tattoo as an homage to the pain of my graduate work. It’s a model of fulvic acid which is a representation of natural organic matter in the soil. I work with this molecule for my grad work and I figured I might as well get it etched into my skin so I can look at it and say, ‘Well, at least it hurt less than grad school at Cornell.’”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

And they’re off. This morning Shell’s Marvin Odum waved the ceremonial green flag, and the 50 vehicles that came down for the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas are getting ready to make their test runs around the oval track on the streets of downtown Houston. It’s the first time the event has come here, and Mayor Parker Annise Parker says it belongs in a car city like hers. “We want to figure out a way to be Houston, but be better about it,” she says. “We’re still a car city, and we get excited for moving vehicles.”

It was a long road just getting here, in the literal and metaphorical sense. University of Missouri team member Jon Tylka says “It’s really a miracle we have a car.” Missouri’s car, seen here, is the only entry in the smaller of the two divisions, urban concept, to run on a hydrogen fuel cell, and it was a couple years in the making. Tylka says the team was formerly working on a solar car, but solar vehicle competitions have been receiving less funding.

Despite the weeks and months that went into the project, Tylka and the team spent three or four all-nighters (it’s hard to remember how many when you’re sleep-deprived) preparing the car before and after the 15-hour drive down from Columbia, Missouri. Its driveshaft sheared before competition, and its electrical system caught fire. Missouri’s car is one of the few equipped with a suspension; they wanted to make the vehicle as close to a real car as possible, but that has presented difficulties too. One team member who speaks German had to call Europe to fix a last-minute bug in the fuel cell. At one point even the horn failed. “The horn has to work, or else we can’t race” Tylka says. Thankfully, they found a replacement.

We’ll keep you posted on how the Tigers do. While it’s a friendly competition, the team has one particular priority: Avoiding the ignominy of losing to one of the high school teams present.

I am traveling extensively for my Sooper Sekrit Project™, and staying in one interchangeable hotel after another. But one recent hotel was a bit special: while perambulating to my room down an outside corridor, I spotted this on the floor:

As it happens, the town I am in — forgive me for not revealing the location! — is very religious, and in a way that shapes like this would easily be revered as some sort of icon of God’s presence. The resemblance to an angel is obvious.

But of course, I happened to be walking back to my room from lunch. Had I instead been walking to lunch when I spotted it, I would’ve seen this view on the left. I suppose angels have to breathe, too, so this could be interpreted as a divine pulmonary system, but somehow I doubt it.

What does it look like to you?

An unusual case of vaginal tumour.

“A young unmarried woman aged 24 years, suffering from cancerophobia, came to the clinic in an acute anxiety state, convinced that she had a malignant growth, having, she stated, only that morning felt a hard lump in the vagina.

She was a well-nourished person and there was no history of loss of weight, menstrual iregularity, or vaginal discharge; nor was there any previous history of gynaecological or other relevant disorder. She did, however, exhibit signs of emotional distress with sweaty palms and tachycardia.

Examination.
A large, hard, smooth lump filed the vagina. On removal it was found to be a globular circumscribed object, possessing no capsule, and on section was seen to have a laminated structure (Figure). It was identified as a specimen of “liliaceaeoma” or an Allium cepa.

The encyclopaedia defines the Allium cepa as one of the family Liliaceae. It has been cultivated from ancient times and probably originated in Asia. The edible part is the bulb containing an acrid volatile oil, giving a strong flavour. The allium is a bienial, the common species producing a bulb in the first season and seeds in the second. The example shewn is evidently of the first season.

Result.
On being informed that she had no cancer, but rather an onion, the patient shewed no signs of pleasure or of gratitude on being so quickly cured of her complaint and relieved of her anxiety. Instead she exhibited signs of anger, the reason for which was the same as had caused the presence of this unexpected vegetable in such an unusual garden. It appeared that her male consort and herself had indulged very freely in alcohol on the previous evening and that he had departed sometime during the night leaving her in a deep sleep on the bed. The removal of the onion from a bunch of its fellows hanging on the back of the door, and its subsequent insertion, had been his parting gesture of affection.”

[This is the full article, but the free PDF is also available here.]

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Rectal oven mitt
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Rectal salami
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: So THAT’s where that condom went…

Greetings from sunny Houston. The hotels are overrun with basketball fans donning the colors of Duke, Baylor, and other colleges playing basketball here tonight. But the NCAA tournament isn’t the competition that brought DISCOVER deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re here for the Shell Eco-marathon Americas. All weekend long in downtown Houston, students from 29 universities and 9 high schools will he going head-to-head with their prototype ultra-high mileage vehicles. Most of the 50 vehicles are powered by combustion engines, but a smattering of vehicles running on ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells, solar, and petroleum gas have come down to challenge the traditional engine.

Check Discoblog over the weekend, as we’ll be continually updating on the wild cars and their brilliant young designers. Official competition runs Saturday and Sunday. However, given that winners of past eco-marathons have reached efficiencies in the thousands of miles per gallon, these vehicles might just keep on going.

First the smog, then the stink. Beijing’s white hot economic growth has led not just to smoggy skies but also stinky landfills that are literally taking people’s breath away.

Faced with overflowing landfills across the city, Beijing residents have been complaining about the rising stench of garbage that can be overpowering when the wind blows. So, the government decided to remedy the situation by installing 100 giant deodorant guns aimed at the city’s stinkiest landfill–the Asuwei dump site on the edge of Beijing.

The high-pressure cannons, like the one seen here being used at a public gathering, can spray dozens of pints of fragrance per minute over a distance of 160 feet. In addition to being bathed in sweet perfume, the Asuwei dump site will also get extra plastic layers to cover the garbage so that the smell doesn’t waft towards the city when the wind blows.

But The Guardian reports that it would take more than a few plastic sheets and perfume guns to zap Beijing’s garbage problems away:

According to the local government, the city of 17m people generates 18,000 tonnes of waste every day — 7,000 tonnes more than the capacity of municipal disposal plants.

The city recycles less than four percent of its rubbish each year, and the city’s residents continue to churn out trash too fast for the city to either bury or burn it. City officials want to build more incinerators, but those have pollution problems of their own–six incinerator projects within Beijing have been put on hold due to public protests. So, till those projects are approved, or the till the government figures out another way to take out the collected trash, Beijing residents will just have to spritz and bear it.

Related Content:
Discoblog: A Year After the Olympics, Beijing’s Air Quality Back at Square One
Discoblog: Could Beijing’s Polluted Air Sicken Olympic Spectators?
Discoblog: The Air Over There: As the Olympics End, a Look Back at Air Quality
80beats: 1/3 of China’s Yellow River Not Even Fit for Industrial Use

Image: The Register

Former Roman Catholic priest and respected evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has won this year’s Templeton Prize. The $1.53 million award honors a living person “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” The John Templeton Foundation cited Ayala’s dogged work through the years advocating the peaceful co-existence of science and religion in its decision. The somewhat controversial prize is often given to scientists who find common ground between religion and science, but previous winners have also included more traditional spiritual leaders like Mother Teresa and televangelist Billy Graham.

Ayala is the former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is respected for his research into the evolutionary history of the parasite scientists have associated with malaria, with an eye toward developing a cure for the disease. He also pioneered the use of an organism’s genetic material as molecular clocks that help track and time its origins [The Christian Science Monitor]. But he is known best, perhaps, for being an expert witness in the 1981 federal court trial that led to the overturning of an Arkansas law mandating the teaching creationism with evolution in science class. In 2001, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

Ayala will receive his award at the Buckingham Palace on May 5, but addressing a press conference yesterday in Washington, D.C. he reiterated that science doesn’t have to contradict religion: “If they are properly understood,” he said, “they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters, and each is essential to human understanding” [Templeton Prize]. Referring to Picasso’s paiting Guernica, which famously depicts the tragedies of war, Ayala noted that science helps us understand the painting’s proportions and pigments, but only a spiritual view conveys the horror of the subject matter. He argued that the spiritual and scientific analyses were both necessary to comprehend the totality of the masterpiece, saying: “Science gives us an insight on reality which is very important; our technology is based on our science…. But at the end of the day, questions important to people, questions of meaning, purpose, moral values, and the like” are not answered through science [The Christian Science Monitor].

Born in Madrid in 1934, Ayala felt the two pulls of religion and science early on. He became an ordained priest, but left the fold when he came to New York’s Columbia University to get an PhD in genetics. He’s currently a top professor of biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Some scientists have criticized the John Templeton Foundation’s work, arguing that science and religion shouldn’t be mixed up together. Critics were further angered when the National Academy of Sciences hosted the Templeton Foundation’s announcement of Ayala’s award, saying that the foundation may gain scientific respectability by associating with scientists and their institutions [Guardian].

California Institute of Technology physicist Sean Carroll, who writes for the DISCOVER blog Cosmic Variance, was one of those who voiced his disapproval: “The Templeton Foundation is working in good faith. They’re in favour of science but want to see a reconciliation with religion. That’s not evil and crackpotty, but it’s incorrect. It’s a mistake…. I’m not asking NAS to put out an official statement of atheism. They don’t have to take a stand either way, but the academy is best served by just staying away” [Nature blog]. But the NAS president Ralph Cicerone waved the concerns away, saying NAS agreed to host the event when a member of the foundation requested a room for the ceremony.

Ayala plans to give his award money to charity.

Related Content:
The Intersection: Francisco Ayala Wins Templeton Prize
Gene Expression: Francisco Ayala & autogenocide
DISCOVER: The God Experiments
80beats: Quantum Physicist Wins $1.4M Templeton Prize for Writing on “Veiled Reality”
Cosmic Variance: In Bed With Templeton questions political spending by John Templeton, Jr.
Cosmic Variance: Templeton and Skeptics discusses a conference on science and religion

Image: Mark Finkenstaedt/Templeton Prize

When I saw this painting, I got tears in my eyes. Seriously.

I just love this. I think it’s the angles; the 3/4 turn of the grandmother and baby, the look of absorption on the baby’s face, and the semi-gibbous phase of the Earth.

And, of course, the sentiment. You can read a lot into this painting. But isn’t that what art is for?

This work is by Chase Stone, who has a lot of amazing art posted on DeviantArt. I strongly recommend going through his stuff.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Reddit.

Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don’t know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you’ll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read its sequence, you’ll discover an astonishing diversity of genes belonging to those microbes–thousands in a single spoon of soil. But now try to rear those microbes in a lab. When scientists try, they generally fail. A tiny fraction of one percent of microbe species will grow under ordinary conditions in Petri dish.

This staggering difficulty is the reason why E. coli and a few other species became the laboratory darlings of biologists during the 1900s. As I write in Microcosm, E. coli will happily explode in a flask full of broth. As a result, a lot of what we know about life we know from E. coli. Certainly a lot of those lessons hold true for any species–genes encoded in DNA, DNA used to produce RNA and proteins, a genetic code, and so on. But there are a lot of microbes that are very unlike E. coli. Even in our gut, for example, E. coli is just a minor player in an ecosystem made up of hundreds or thousands of species. Yet we know relatively little about its neighbors.

One reason for the trouble we have in raising microbes is that the environment we like is not the environment a lot of them like. If you are feeding on minerals in boiling water at the bottom of the ocean, it’s possible that you might find life in a luke-warm flask in an oxygen-rich atmosphere at sea-level air pressure unbearable–perhaps even toxic.

But the physical surroundings of microbes can’t account for all the trouble they pose for would-be microbial zoo-keepers. If you scoop up some wet sand from a pleasant beach, you will still be hard-pressed to get more than a few species to grow in the lab.

To coax bacteria to grow, microbiologists have been upgrading their Petri dishes. They have been building cages that mimic the natural habitat of the bacteria, and in some cases taking their chambers out of the lab and putting them in the environments where the bacteria live.

These semi-wild chambers have brought scientists more success, and they’ve also helped scientists figure out why the microbes are so hard to grow in the first place. Along with the right physical conditions, microbes need to live alongside the right microbes.

In the new issue of Chemistry and Biology, a team of scientists–led by Anthony D’Onofrio, a post-doc in the laboratory of Kim Lewis at Northeastern University, and Jason Crawford in the lab of Jon Clardy at Harvard–report a striking success in cultivating bacteria that were previously impossible to cultivate. They made their discovery while studying some bacteria that live on a beach near Boston. Some of the bacteria, while unable to grow on their own in a Petri dish, grew if they were near certain other species. Perhaps, the scientists speculated, the hard-to-grow bacteria depended on something the other species made.

The scientists tested different molecules made by bacteria to see if any of them were fostering the growth. They eventually figured out that the responsible molecule was something known as a siderophore. Some species of bacteria make siderophores as a way to get their minimal daily required does of iron. Iron is essential for the growth of cells, but in many environments free iron is in short supply. So bacteria make iron-trapping molecules–siderophores–and release them through special channels. The siderophores drift around, and sometimes manage to snag iron atoms. They fold up around the iron, assuming a shape that allows them to slip through other channels back into the bacteria. Once inside, they open up again and set their iron free.

It turns out that a lot of species on the beaches around Boston–and presumably in a lot of other places in the world–don’t make their own siderophores. Instead, they rely on other species to produce siderophores, and once those molecules swallow up the iron, the bacteria that don’t make siderophores snatch them up. The scientists found that with different kinds of siderophores made by different species of bacteria, they could suddenly get a lot of microbes to grow.

Discoveries like these are exciting both in a practical and intellectual way. We’ve already harvested lots of valuable molecules from microbes, such as antibiotics and gene-copying enzymes. If scientists can raise lots of new species of microbes, they may be able to find new molecules. But the result is fascinating in itself. Apparently, a lot of microbial species depend on the kindness of strangers. And apparently, there are bacteria out there that are churning out siderophores despite the fact that other species are slurping up the iron they forage. If that was all there was to the story, this would not be a situation that could last long. The cheaters would thrive by skipping the effort of making siderophores, and eventually there wouldn’t be enough honest bacteria left to keep all the microbes supplied with their iron. It’s likely, instead, that the cheaters are not cheaters at all, but rather have services of their own to offer the microbial community.

And so the reason that we know so little about life on Earth may be that we have yet to figure out the complicated social life of microbes.