Bacteria (Part 1)

40 Amazing Bacteria Facts (Part 1) | Amazing Facts 4U

40 Amazing Bacteria Facts (Part 1) | Amazing Facts 4U

  1. All bacteria are composed of just one cell and that’s why they are called unicellular organisms. However, they have the ability to divide themselves into two cells, forming two distinct bacteria.
  2. Amazingly bacteria can act like plants or animals. These are some of the oldest and diverse forms of life.
  3. Bacteria have been on earth for amazing 3 billion years.
  4. Bacteria have been around longer than anything else on Earth, longer even than dinosaurs. If you imagine Earth began as a single day then bacteria appeared at 5 am, Dinosaurs appeared at 10 pm and humans appeared seconds before midnight.
  5. Bacteria were discovered in the 17th century by scientist Antony Van Leeuwenhoek.
  6. Ferdinand Cohn, a German biologist (1828 -1898), was the man who termed the unicellular organisms like bacteria.
  7. In 2007, biologists revived an 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the Antarctic ice.
  8. The amazing fact is that biologists have also extracted and successfully grown bacteria from a fossilized bee 40 million years old.
  9. Bacteria and their relatives number at least five billion trillions. If you line them all up in a straight line, they would stretch from here to the edge of the known universe (about ten billion light-years away).
  10. Bacteria are classified mainly into three shapes, sphere (coccus), spiral (spirillum), or rod (bacillus).
  11. Bacteria are about 1000 nanometres in size (a nanometre is one-millionth of a millimeter).
  12. Bacteria are very resilient forms of life. They are present everywhere in all situations, from near-boiling water to the deepest ocean, inside of a rock, on radioactive waste, and even in ice. They are very tough, have existed before us, and would also outlive us.
  13. It’s amazing that you are born microbe-free and acquire the full complement of bacteria by around the age of 3.
  14. There are in fact more bacteria cells in your body than there are human cells. There are in fact more bacteria in your intestine than there are people on earth. Most of them are usually friendly and actually help us in many ways.
  15. In fact, some bacteria can live without oxygen.
  16. One species (ocean-dweller Pseudomonas natriegens) can reach bacteria puberty about ten minutes after they’re born. It is so prolific that in theory, a single organism could produce about one billion little clones between lunch and dinnertime.
  17. Bacteria (usually dead or weak ones) are used to make vaccines.
  18. There are 10 times more bacteria in the average human’s digestive system than there are cells in the entire body. This is approximately 1 kg of bacteria.
  19. The amazing fact is that the strongest creatures on Earth are gonorrhea bacteria. They can pull 100,000 times their own body weight.
  20. Humans have in fact known to make use of bacteria for thousands of years. Bacteria are used to make yogurt and cheese. The flavor of these foods comes from bacterial byproducts.
  21. Bacteria produce oxygen for us to breathe possibly as much as half of the oxygen that we breathe.
  22. Bacteria can cause food poisoning but dangerous bacteria are killed when we cook food. They grow very slowly in the cold so that is why it is important to properly cook and refrigerate food.
  23. The bacterial infection is responsible for many diseases in our body like abscess, ear infections, cavities, diarrhea, Pneumonia, Typhoid, Tetanus, Tuberculosis, etc. Most bacteria in fact do not cause disease, less than 5% do.
  24. Special drugs that can kill bacteria are called antibiotics which are frequently misused for viral diseases like colds and flu.
  25. Frequent use of antibiotics has resulted in many antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains causing infections difficult to control.
  26. Most antibiotics are made from bacteria.
  27. Amazingly bacteria can get affected by viruses.
  28. Without bacteria, we would have no soil in which to grow plants.
  29. Bacteria are used to clean water in sewage plants.
  30. Bacteria and fungus are often in close proximity and they sometimes compete for common resources or try and eat each other. In fact, many of our antibiotics are derived from the natural defenses of fungi against bacteria.
  31. The amazing fact is when you wear headphones for just one hour, it increases the bacteria count in your ear about 700 times.
  32. All of the bacteria in our body collectively weigh about 5 pounds.
  33. It’s amazing that the average office desk has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet.
  34. Scientists have found a type of bacteria that can eat oil spills to clean it all up for us.
  35. Almost one million bacteria can be created by one person in a day. Under the right conditions, bacteria double their number every 20 minutes.
  36. Bad breath is due to bacteria in the nose and mouth.
  37. An amazing fact is every square inch (6.5 sq. cm) of your skin hosts about 6 million bacteria.
  38. About 1000 different microbes live in your healthy gut. Having good gut flora (bacteria in the gut) is important for human health.
  39. Raisins and dried fruits can cause more tooth decay than chocolate because they stay on the teeth longer and therefore feed the bacteria that cause tooth decay.
  40. The average lavatory seat is much cleaner than the average toothbrush. Your teeth are home to 10,000 million bacteria per square centimeter.

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~ By Amazing Facts 4U Team

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