Maximilienne Toetie Allaart receives funding from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for her postdoctoral work. Her PhD project, of which the work described here was part, was funded through the ...

Conservation biologists propose a daunting task: protecting Earth’s diversity of bacteria and other microbes. By Carl Zimmer Hundreds of scientists have joined together to save a group of species from ...

At the northern edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert sits a pile of rocks that’s so big that you can see it from space—and it’s teeming with invisible activity. Billions of microbes are hard at work ...