The Extremeophile Awards: honoring Earth's hardest-living bacteria

The Lab Rat blog is handing out awards to the hardest-living bacteria on Earth. My favorite winner: Photobacterium profundum, which can live happy and reasonably healthy at a ridiculously wide range of pressures—from 14.5 psi (the standard pressure of our atmosphere), all the way up to 10,152 psi.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Anonymous

14.5psi a “standard” pressure?
Where and since when?

101.3kPa please, or at the very worst 1Bar, 1 Atmosphere or something recognisable.

The only place I ever use psi is when I’m checking the tyre pressures on the car.
MadDuck

And at 10,153 psi? It’s always the last 0.001% that gets you!