A trio of Nevada professors is working with NASA to investigate what drives life deep underground, hoping to create a better understanding of how ecosystems can thrive miles beneath the surface of Earth— and potentially on other planets.

The Nevada team, which will include researchers from the Desert Research Institute, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will collect samples from underground sites in Nevada and the southwest to study how microbial communities use radiation byproducts to survive.

You dry pots with it, wipe your hands on it, and use it to swab the counter, but when you’re done—if you’re like me—you probably hang your trusty kitchen towel right back on the oven or dishwasher door handle. And this cycle repeats for days, weeks, maybe even months with a single dish rag.

To minimize the use of plastic as a single-use packaging, alternatively, if you have to use a plastic bag, a rubber bag can be an alternative if you are stuck. Indeed, it is better to accommodate frozen food or stored in a refrigerator with an air-tight food container. But so that you can store a lot of piles, you can use the plastic bag bank used many times. However, microbiologists suggest the following.

Although disposable storage bags are so handy, it can be wasteful to use a zip-top plastic baggie just once and then throw it away. But, in the name of being environmentally conscious, is it actually safe to wash and reuse the plastic bags?

Bacteria are literally everywhere -- in oceans, in soils, in extreme environments like hot springs, and even alongside and inside other organisms including humans. They're nearly invisible, yet they play a big role in almost every facet of life on Earth.

The team of UNLV microbiologists set up their equipment in the end of a pipe connected to a natural spring, hoping to filter some of the smallest known living things out of the nearly 4,000-year-old water.

Current regulations of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes require new species to be grown in a lab and distributed as pure and viable cultures. To prove it, you have to have more than one specimen. A team of scientists presented a new system, the SeqCode, and a corresponding registration portal in an article published in the journal Nature Microbiology.