Microbes helping shape the weather?

Lots of things are up in the air these days, ...

Recent research published in PNAS suggests that the diversity of microbial life in the air is on par with the soil, at least in urban areas, yet the air remains vastly understudied in comparison.

"Just seven or ten years ago we didn't realize bacteria existed in clouds," said Anne-Marie Delort, professor of microbiology and organic chemistry at Université Blaise Pascal in France. Now researchers know microbes act as a surface for the condensation of water vapor in the atmosphere, thus forming clouds. Recent research publish in Science shows microbes also play the same role during snowflake formation and other types of precipitation. The next step, Delort said, is to uncover their metabolic activity in clouds and influence on atmospheric processes. If they are metabolically active, she added, microbes could not only be acting as cloud condensers, but affecting the carbon and nitrogen cycles as well.

It all rather reminds one of Michael Denton's view, in Nature's Destiny that just about all ecological niches are actually occupied (plenitude of life).

Can anyone think of a niche that could be occupied but isn't?

DarwinLeaks: New blog aims to leak Darwin stories, no jail time anticipated

With a hat tip, one supposes, to Wiki Leaker Julian Assange, a friend alerts me to DarwinLeaks hoping it will "do the same to Darwin and disciples from a history of science point of view." The blog is in Portuguese, but can be translated at the site. It certainly looked interesting; when I checked in, the question was why the correspondence between Darwin and Mivart, the well-known anatomist with whom Darwin fell out, has never been released to the Internet. There is some thought that it may falsify some current explanations for the breach between the two men.

Well, there is only one way to find out about that ...

That said, Darwinism thrives on its cultural power. It wouldn't matter who said what or how it relates to reality. Most of the interesting revelations are pretty widely available, actually, but the cost of the cognitive dissonance of "Darwin was wrong about the key things" is much too high for many people. They suspect they look better in a monkey suit than they would in their own, and I am reluctant to offer an opinion.