The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish (Kishony Lab)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN links it as a visually striking demonstration of evolution and antibiotic resistance happening in days.
What it is
A two-minute time-lapse from the Kishony Lab showing bacteria spreading across a giant petri dish with increasing antibiotic doses, evolving resistance as they go.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2016 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lossolo · 2016-09 · on “The Age of the Superbug Is Here”
This is an amazing video[1] from Harvard Medical School released couple of days ago showing evolution of bacteria that evolve in 10 days to become resistant to antibiotics. [1] [this video]
Strong rec robocat · 2019-07 · on “Bladder cancer 'attacked and killed by common cold virus'”
> Why do you think the strongest of the strong bacteria are found in hospitals? I presume you mean strong against antibiotics and sterilisation. The evolved bacteria are likely weaker along other dimensions (that are less important for survival in a hospital setting). Some evolution is compromises, improving X has cost Y. Aside: the mega-plate video is an unbelievably good demonstration of bacterial evolution: [this video] especially note the tree at the end showing how many different mutations evolved.
Recommends Retric · 2016-09 · on “Videos of Evolution in Action”
The video shows mutations in real time as bacteria grow or fail to grow in various places. [this video] It's more a demonstration than experiment, but visually it's just really striking.
Recommends sengork · 2017-01 · on “How to Avoid a Post-Antibiotic World”
For those that would like to visualise how the bacteria vs anitbiotics evolve in an experiment over 11 days, have a look at this video from Harvard: [this video]
Recommends ramgorur · 2018-03 · on “The man who bottled evolution”
Harvard medical school did a similar experiment on fast evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics on a petri-dish. It also clearly shows the lineage of evolution. Very interesting. [this video]
Recommends idiocrat · 2023-01 · on “It's 2023 and I still have to touch a piss soaked door handle to exit a bathroom”
Strengthens your immune system. Without exposure (playing in mud, touching other people), we are only weaker. Bio life is really complicated. Sterilization works well only to a certain degree, before becoming damaging, e.g. causing resistance. Somewhat related, here is an interesting visualization of bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. [this video]
Cites lmilcin · 2019-01 · on “Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates”
It is absolutely nowhere near evolutionary adaptive capacity. Life will not end and the world will still be there. Life's evolutionary adaptive capacity is stagerring! Just take a look at the experiment where it barely stretches muscles: [this video] What I understand they mean is "Life as we know it" defined as large animals and familiar plants roughly in places where we are used to seeing them. We are looking at life with our antropocentric point of view and we basically want familiar stuff to stay the same and we don't want unfamiliar stuff to show up. We don't want things to change and that's why potential large shift in how life presents itself may be caulled as "end of the world" event, but
Cites estebank · 2020-10 · on “SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility”
The mitigations are effective in slowing the spread (to varying degrees, due to a multitude of factors), which in turn slow down the rate of mutation. In any case, I would expect the dispersion of the virus to follow a pattern similar to [this video]