GrahamH wrote:

Deremensis wrote:He has a point that's worth making - the article is misleading in saying that the bacteria take only "pure energy" as input. That's patently wrong. You can't really build an organism from an energy gradient alone - it's necessary to take in a variety of other chemical inputs.

Does the article say that? "that the bacteria take only "pure energy" as input"?

Deremensis wrote:The interesting part of this article is that the bacteria get energy without using a chemical "middleman" like a sugar.

Which is what the article states.

Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

That should not come as a complete surprise, says Kenneth Nealson at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. We know that life, when you boil it right down, is a flow of electrons: "You eat sugars that have excess electrons, and you breathe in oxygen that willingly takes them." Our cells break down the sugars, and the electrons flow through them in a complex set of chemical reactions until they are passed on to electron-hungry oxygen.

In the process, cells make ATP, a molecule that acts as an energy storage unit for almost all living things. Moving electrons around is a key part of making ATP. "Life's very clever," says Nealson. "It figures out how to suck electrons out of everything we eat and keep them under control." In most living things, the body packages the electrons up into molecules that can safely carry them through the cells until they are dumped on to oxygen.

Deremensis wrote: That doesn't make them an "electric lifeform" that "lives on pure energy." It's simply interesting and has some possible unique applications in biotechnology.

Again, where does the article sate "lives on pure energy"? It's just some hyperbole in a NS title. Anyone who fails to read beyond the title, or limits his response to such hyperbole, is surely doing it wrong.

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