BACTERIA SPIN GEARS

One bacterium, working alone, can‚ accomplish much. But put a bunch of them together, and they can move mountains.

Well, maybe not mountains. But how about a tiny gear?

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern and Princeton have shown that the collective swimming behavior of bacteria can be harnessed for work.

In some respects, bacterial swimming resembles Brownian motion, the random movement of particles or molecules in a medium. But Igor S. Aranson, an Argonne researcher who is the senior author of a paper describing the work in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that in equilibrium conditions, it was impossible to extract useful energy