Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hi, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here with Science Reporter Ari Daniel. Hey, Ari. Hi, Emily. I hear you are taking us on a trip to Colorado for this story. You have heard correctly, to a special place just outside the bustling town of Manitou Springs, to a spot called Ironspring. It's one of the places where you can actually hear the Earth's inner rumblings burble to the surface as spring water. At this particular well, every few seconds, a burst of mineral water surges out of a narrow pipe, splashing into a concrete basin. So it's like an old, tiny water fountain made by nature. Yeah, that's a good way to think of it, Emily. There are people who do drink this water, but it's something of an acquired taste. Tastes like iron. If you're a vampire, you'd be a fan. This is Doug Edmondson. He heads the Mineral Springs Foundation. When we meet up for this story, he shows me how here, above ground, that iron rusts, which is why part of the basin is dyed a bright orange. Rust will do that. I remember my red flyer wagon rusted with time. Absolutely. And most folks are probably familiar with the idea of rust, where iron oxidizes, basically interacting with oxygen and water, turning into a reddish brown substance. But recently, Emily, I learned there is so much more to rust than just a chemical reaction. Whenever I see that color, I look very carefully, because sometimes it's not chemistry that's forming that rust. It's biology. An entire world of unexplored and undiscovered microbes. Microbes. James Henrickson studies those microbes. He's an environmental microbiologist at Colorado State University. He's with me on this trip to Iron Spring as well, and he's eager to get samples of that rust. That's all the scraping that you're hearing. Wait, he's saying that microbes can live on rust? Actually, what he's saying is it's the microbes making the rust. Wow. And he's come to this well to collect some for science. Just like birders are constantly looking for birds, I'm constantly looking around for evidence of the things that we can't see, the microbes that are everywhere. Because these microbes that have adapted to extreme or unusual environments may have lessons to teach us. So today on the show, we're going on a treasure hunt for microbes. What if solutions to some of the world's biggest problems, like climate change, cleaning up hazardous waste, and growing crops in hostile environments, could be found inside some of the smallest creatures on earth? You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. This message comes from WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive an up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get WISE. Download the WISE app today or visit wis.com, tees, and seas apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Investing in creative things, you can find the link in the description below. And the message comes from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org. Okay, Ari, today we are talking about microbes. These are single-celled organisms, super, super small, that have found a way to survive in the most unlikely of places like on a rusted mineral well in Colorado. Where else? Well, microbes can thrive in some of the most extreme environments you can think of. Places that are, say, high pressure or super cold or really salty. Microbes are nature's alchemists. So they are capable of taking just about any chemical and turning it into something else to survive. Braden Tierney joined us for our little jaunt to the spring. He's a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School. And Emily, several years back, he began wondering whether he could harness the abilities of these little alchemists to soak up chemicals that are bad for the environment or capture rare earth metals that we need. So he and James co-founded a nonprofit called the Two Frontiers Project to search for microorganisms that could help solve some of our big problems. We travel to sites all around the world where there is microbial life, we think, living that's going to be useful for things like carbon capture or helping corals or improving agriculture. That's quite a venture. Okay, well, where have they gone and what have they found? Well, the hunts taken the team all over the place. They've gone to coral reefs in the Red Sea. They've traveled to the soils of the Mojave Desert and to springs across Colorado like this one. And even get this to volcanic vents off of Sicily where they found a microbe that excels at sucking CO2 up very efficiently. That sounds like a promising microbe for our purposes. Indeed. And they've even named, nicknamed this carbon dioxide sucking microbe, chonkis. To put it very simply, it grows fast and it sinks. Wait, what does chonkis do? Chonkis absorbs more carbon dioxide than a lot of other microbes and then it drops to the bottom of the water column where it can be collected and disposed of easily. Braden and his team think this thing, chonkis, could make an ideal candidate for scaling up to perhaps one day suck down large amounts of planet warming CO2 from the air. I love that for us and for chonkis. And is chonkis one of a kind, like a miracle microbe? Well, they don't think so. Braden says he and his team have already isolated microbes with a quote wide range of physiologies that are similarly unique and useful. And that includes other bacteria that are capable of grabbing carbon out of the air and still others that are associated with corals that appear to produce antibiotics. Yeah. In their efforts to prospect for microbes, it sounds like they've also had to travel to some pretty far flung places. I mean, you're mentioning deserts and volcanoes. Yes, though not always, Emily. Actually, more recently, the team has turned their attention to our homes. What? Which you may well know, Emily, are full of microbes. Do I know that? Well, you do now. I mean, you run slimes and groups everywhere in my profession. Chris Pure worked in facilities maintenance for years, including in Colorado. And he says it's inevitable that pipes clog and drip pans fill with snotty goo, which are often the telltale accumulation of microbes. I would just refer to it as sludge, probably. But one person sludge is another person's startup. Okay. Remember James Henrickson from earlier? Oh, yeah. He's the guy who's like a birder but for microbes. That's the one. So James first got the idea to search for these sludges in the nooks and crannies of our homes when he ran across a paper that documented something that he says. Just had to be horrifying for the person and hilarious for the scientists. This person had slimy tentacles that kept growing back out of their shower head. Oh, that's gross. That got you. And these sludges, while gross, may also have a silver lining. How? How could they possibly? Well, weird slimy things in shower heads, stuff growing in dishwashers, hot water heaters. They're really strange environments. And these potentially extreme environments around our homes and under our noses have pressured microbes into finding ways of grabbing carbon to grow and survive. So what I'm hearing from you, Ari, is that I do not have to clean as much because I'm building the next generation of planet-saving sludge. That's one interpretation, Emily. I'll give you another. And that is that these researchers are hopeful that something that perhaps holds a secret to reducing CO2 levels could well be living in your pipes. Please come in. Rebecca Espinoza is among the community scientists offering up samples from their homes to the Two Frontiers Project for James, Brayden, and their team to study. And they're letting us visit on this particular day. So we're going downstairs. All right. She lives in Loveland, Colorado, about a half hour drive from Fort Collins, and Brayden has come to search her house for potentially planet-saving sludge. Okay, this is cool. He samples a shower head scraping for microbial delicacies, and then he goes after a drain in her basement. That looks really gross. But to a microbiologist, it's very exciting. Brayden's team reached out to homeowners nationwide. Can I participate? Not a homeowner, but I definitely have some sludge. Well, unfortunately, the project's now closed. But before they shut things down, they received over 70 curious knots and bruise. As with all their samples, the researchers sequenced the DNA to census the microbes and determine whether any new species might be useful to us. Because hacking the adaptations of microbes for our purposes is complicated. Microbes are amazing at what they do, but can we get their processes into a system that's economically competitive that we can scale and deploy? Lisa Stein is a climate change microbiologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. She says that scientists have been looking for novel microorganisms for decades, actually. So the Two Frontiers project is kind of like a shot in the dark. But she also told me that microbes are constantly evolving. And she hasn't seen anyone sample in the home like this before. Kudos to them for having that idea. Like, that's pretty innovative right there. Yeah, I kind of agree. Like, not all heroes wear capes, and they could be living in our houses. But it sounds like we won't be seeing them sold as products or on the market anytime soon. Right. And I need to mention that the best way to bring down CO2 levels probably won't be found in your shower head, but rather by reducing emissions, the largest of which remains transportation. And what's more, carbon capture efforts, at least so far, have proved to be energy-intensive and difficult to scale. That's something that James told me too, this idea that the path from microbial discovery to widespread deployment is a long one. We have to be focused on things that can work in the real world, not just discovering organisms that are interesting for their own sake. And so the hunt for a microbial marvel that can bail us out of our many, many messes continues. Ari Daniel, thank you for coming on Shortwave. My pleasure, anytime, Emily. Shortwavers, if you like this episode, give us a follow. It really helps the show. Also, check out our episode on worm blobs found in toxic cave water and the hunt for future medicines in the ocean's depths. We'll link them in our episode notes. And if you want to learn more about a new initiative from the Two Frontiers Project that you could get involved with, check out our show notes as well. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR. See you next time. Support for NPR and the following message come from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, investing in creative thinkers and problem solvers who help people, communities, and the planet flourish. More information is available at Hewlett.org.
