Rare Microbes Turn Toxic Sludge into Usable Copper

(Inside Science) — It took only 48 hours to turn a bottle of toxic, dark ochre sludge into something that looked more like an orange-tinged hazy beer. Within the bottle, invisible to the naked eye, a newly discovered bacterial strain referred to only as 105 was eating away at toxic copper sulfate to leave pure copper atoms. The bacteria had been found in the tailings pond of a Brazilian mine, and they were completing their task with little of the pollution and energy currently used by industry to produce similar results.