These little microbes may help solve our big problems

Summary

Podcast Summary: "These little microbes may help solve our big problems"

Podcast: Short Wave (NPR)
Host: Emily Kwong
Guest: Ari Daniel (science reporter), Braden Tierney (Harvard Medical School microbiologist), Doug Edmondson (Mineral Springs Foundation), James Henriksen (Colorado State University), Lisa Stein (University of Alberta)
Air Date: January 12, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode of Short Wave explores the hidden world of microbes—tiny organisms that thrive in unexpected and extreme environments—and their potential to help solve some of humanity’s biggest environmental challenges, including climate change and pollution. Science reporter Ari Daniel joins Emily Kwong to visit Colorado’s Iron Spring, meet microbial prospectors, and discuss how looking for unusual bacteria—from volcanic vents to home pipes—could spark innovative solutions for the future.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Discovering “Rust Microbes” at Iron Spring

[00:33–02:53]

• Scene Setting: Ari Daniel describes visiting Iron Spring near Manitou Springs, Colorado, where iron-rich mineral water bursts from the ground, leaving behind bright orange rust.
• Chemical vs. Biological Rust: While most know rust as a chemical reaction, Doug Edmondson (Mineral Springs Foundation) notes, “Sometimes it’s not chemistry that’s forming that rust, it’s biology. An entire world of unexplored and undiscovered microbes.” (01:52)
• Sampling Microbes: Environmental microbiologist James Henriksen from Colorado State University collects rust samples, emphasizing that certain microbes create rust as a byproduct of their survival.

2. Microbes as Environmental Problem-Solvers

[02:53–07:23]

• Microbial Treasure Hunt: Ari Daniel proposes, “What if solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, like climate change, cleaning up hazardous waste, and growing crops in hostile environments, could be found inside some of the smallest creatures on Earth?” (02:57)
• Microbes' Superpowers: Braden Tierney (Harvard Medical School) calls them “nature’s alchemists... capable of taking just about any chemical and turning it into something else to survive.” (04:54)
• The Two Frontiers Project: Tierney and Henriksen co-founded this nonprofit to search for microbes that can help with carbon capture, coral reef health, and agriculture. They travel globally—to the Red Sea, Mojave Desert, Colorado springs, and even volcanic vents off Sicily—in search of unique species.
• Chonkus the Super Microbe: One volcanic vent sample yielded a microbe nicknamed “Chonkus.” As Tierney explains, “To put it very simply, it grows fast and it sinks.” (06:24) Its rapid growth and efficient CO2 absorption makes it a promising candidate for future carbon sequestration technologies.
• Diversity of Solutions: “We’ve already isolated microbes with a wide range of physiologies that are similarly unique and useful.” (07:02) Some fix carbon; others produce antibiotics that could help save coral reefs.

3. Microbe Prospecting in Unexpected Places—Our Homes

[07:23–09:49]

• Turning to Domestic Microbes: After scouring exotic locations, the team realizes homes are also microbe havens. “You run into slimes and goobs everywhere in my profession,” says Chris Bure, referencing maintenance jobs and the discovery of microbial sludge in pipes. (07:48)
• The Showerhead Tentacle Incident: A paper on “slimy tentacles that kept growing back out of their shower head” launches a new project focus: collecting domestic sludge for study. “Horrifying for the person and hilarious for the scientists.” (08:31)
• Potential Silver Lining: Not all household sludge is bad. Microbes living in hostile spots like water heaters and dishwashers may have evolved unique carbon capture abilities that could inform environmental tech.
• Community Science: Rebecca Espinosa, a Loveland, CO, resident, allows the team to collect samples from her house. “It looks really gross, but to a microbiologist, it’s very exciting.” (10:12)
• Public Participation: The project received over 70 home samples (“curious snots and brews”) from volunteers before wrapping up.

4. Scientific & Practical Challenges to Microbial Solutions

[10:44–12:20]

• Technological Hurdles: Lisa Stein (University of Alberta) notes that researchers have searched for helpful microbes for decades, but scaling up to industry is tough. “Can we get their processes into a system that’s economically competitive, that we can scale and deploy?” (10:49)
• Innovation in Homes: Stein adds she’s never seen a citizen science project target domestic plumbing like this—calling it “pretty innovative.” (11:18)
• Realistic Expectations: Ari Daniel stresses, “The best way to bring down CO2 level probably won’t be found in your shower head, but rather by reducing emissions.”
• Microbial Innovation Takes Time: Doug Edmondson warns, “We have to be focused on things that can work in the real world, not just discovering organisms that are interesting for their own sake.” (12:04)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Surprising Sources of Innovation:

  • “Sometimes it’s not chemistry that’s forming that rust, it’s biology. An entire world of unexplored and undiscovered microbes.” — Doug Edmondson (01:52)
  • “Microbes are nature’s alchemists, so they are capable of taking just about any chemical and turning it into something else to survive.” — Braden Tierney (04:54)
  • “It looks really gross, but to a microbiologist, it’s very exciting.” — Braden Tierney (10:12)

• On Citizen-Science:

  • “Kudos to them for having that idea. Like, not all heroes wear capes, and they could be living in our houses.” — Emily Kwong (11:18)

• On Caveats and Real World Impact:

  • “The best way to bring down CO2 level probably won’t be found in your shower head, but rather by reducing emissions, the largest of which remains transportation.” — Ari Daniel (11:35)
  • “We have to be focused on things that can work in the real world, not just discovering organisms that are interesting for their own sake.” — Doug Edmondson (12:04)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:33] – Introduction to Iron Spring and rust as a habitat
• [01:52] – Rust as biological, not just chemical, phenomenon
• [02:57] – Framing the episode’s “treasure hunt” for useful microbes
• [04:54] – Microbes described as “nature’s alchemists”
• [06:24–06:56] – Introduction of “Chonkus,” the CO2-sinking microbe
• [07:23–09:49] – Microbial prospecting moves into homes; showerhead sludge stories
• [10:12] – Sampling household sludge
• [10:49, 11:18] – Challenges scaling microbial solutions; citizen science praised
• [12:04] – Importance of real-world viability for microbial tech

---

Episode Tone & Style

Short Wave delivers science with a friendly, curious, and occasionally humorous approach. Emily Kwong’s and Ari Daniel’s banter keeps the episode lively and accessible, emphasizing that science is happening everywhere—even in our own pipes and drains. Listeners are encouraged to see microbes not as gross hazards, but as potential heroes in the fight against climate change.

---

For more details, and to get involved or find related episodes, check the show notes linked in the podcast.

Transcript

[Amazon One Medical Announcer]

This message comes from Amazon One Medical. Your body talks to you. Symptoms are the body's way of asking for help. Amazon One Medical has 24. 7 virtual care with providers fluent in body talk. Thanks to AmazonOne, medical healthcare just got less painful.

[Emily Kwong]

You're listening to shortwave from npr. Hi, short wavers. Emily Kwong here with science reporter Ari Daniel. Hey, Ari.

[Ari Daniel]

Hi, Emily.

[Emily Kwong]

I hear you are taking us on a trip to Colorado for this story.

[Ari Daniel]

You have heard correctly, to a special place just outside the bustling town of Manitou Springs, to a spot called Iron Spring. It's one of the places where you can actually hear the earth's inner rumblings burble to the surface as spring water. At this particular well, every few seconds, a burst of mineral water surges out of a narrow pipe, slowly splashing into a concrete basin.

[Emily Kwong]

Oh, so it's like a old timey water fountain made by nature.

[Ari Daniel]

Yeah, that's a good way to think of it, Emily. There are people who do drink this water, but it's something of an acquired taste. Tastes like iron.

[Doug Edmondson]

If you're a vampire, you'd be a fan.

[Ari Daniel]

This is Doug Edmondson. He heads the Mineral Springs Foundation. When we meet up for this story, he shows me how here, above ground, that iron raised rusts, which is why part of the basin is dyed a bright orange.

[Emily Kwong]

Rust will do that. I remember my Red Flyer wagon rusted with time.

[Ari Daniel]

Absolutely. And most folks are probably familiar with the idea of rust, where iron oxidizes, basically interacting with oxygen and water, turning into a reddish brown substance. But recently, Emily, I learned there is so much more to rust than just a chemical reaction.

[Doug Edmondson]

Whenever I see that color, I look very carefully, because sometimes it's not chemistry that's forming that rust, it's biology. An entire world of unexplored and undiscovered microbes.

[Emily Kwong]

Microbes.

[Ari Daniel]

James Henriksen studies those microbes. He's an environmental microbiologist at Colorado State University. He's with me on this trip to Iron Spring as well, and he's eager to get samples of that rust. That. That's all this scraping that you're hearing.

[Emily Kwong]

Wait, he's saying that microbes can live on rust?

[Ari Daniel]

Actually, what he's saying is it's the microbes making the rust. Wow. And he's come to this. Well, to collect some for science.

[Doug Edmondson]

Just like birders are constantly looking for birds, I'm constantly looking around for evidence of the things that we can't see, the microbes that are everywhere, because these.

[Ari Daniel]

Microbes that have adapted to extreme or unusual environments may have lessons to teach us.

[Emily Kwong]

So today on the show, we're going on a treasure hunt for microbes.

[Ari Daniel]

What if solutions to some of the world's biggest problems, like climate change, cleaning up hazardous waste and growing crops in hostile environments, could be found inside some of the smallest creatures on Earth?

[Emily Kwong]

You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from npr.

[Sponsor Announcer]

This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Follow your wellness goals and save big with sales on supplements and vitamins. Explore an abundance of high quality multivitamins, probiotics and protein powders. Keep good habits going strong. Cook homemade meals featuring sustainable wild caught sockeye salmon and many more delicious and lean protein options for wellness when you need it. Shop smart meal shortcuts to stay motivated like ready to eat salad kits. Shop all things wellness at Whole Foods Market.

[Amazon One Medical Announcer]

This message comes from Amazon One Medical. Your body tells you all kinds of stuff. Headaches and hair loss are its way of saying something is up over here. Amazon One Medical has 247 virtual care, so there's always someone available to listen and help with whatever your body is trying to tell you. Thanks to Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.

[Sponsor Announcer]

This message comes from the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, recognizing extraordinarily creative individuals whose ideas, solutions and discoveries expand people's expectations of what's possible.

[Emily Kwong]

Macfound.org okay, Ari, today we are talking about microbes. These are single celled organisms, super, super small that have found a way to survive in the most unlikely of places, like on a rusted mineral well in Colorado.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Where else?

[Ari Daniel]

Well, microbes can thrive in some of the most extreme environments you can think of, places that are, say, high pressure or super cold or really salty.

[Braden Tierney]

Microbes are nature's alchemists, so they are capable of taking just about any chemical and turning it into something else to survive.

[Ari Daniel]

Braden Tierney joined us for our little jaunt to the spring. He's a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School. And Emily, several years back, he began wondering whether he could harness the abilities of these little alchemists to soak up chemicals that are bad for the environment or capture rare earth metals that we need. So he and James co founded a nonprofit called the Two Frontiers Project to search for microorganisms that could help solve some of our big problems.

[Braden Tierney]

We travel to sites all around the world where there is microbial life. We think living that's going to be useful for things like carbon capture or helping corals or improving agriculture.

[Emily Kwong]

That's quite a venture. Okay, well, where have they gone and what have they found?

[Ari Daniel]

Well, the hunt's taken the team all over the place. They've gone to coral reefs in the Red Sea. They've traveled to the soils of the Mojave Desert and to springs across Colorado like this one. And even get this to volcanic vents off of Sicily, where they found a microbe that excels at sucking CO2 up very efficiently.

[Emily Kwong]

That sounds like a promising microbe for our purposes.

[Ari Daniel]

Indeed. And they've even named, nicknamed this carbon dioxide sucking microbe Chonkass.

[Braden Tierney]

To put it very simply, it grows fast and it sinks.

[Emily Kwong]

Wait, what does Chonkus do?

[Ari Daniel]

Chonkass absorbs more carbon dioxide than a lot of other microbes, and then it drops to the bottom of the water column where it can be collected and disposed of easily. Braden and his team think this thing, Chonkus, could make an ideal candidate for scaling up to perhaps one day suck down large amounts of planet warming CO2 from the air.

[Emily Kwong]

I love that. For us and for Chonkus.

[Ari Daniel]

Yeah.

[Emily Kwong]

And is Chonkus one of a kind, like a miracle microbe?

[Ari Daniel]

Well, they don't think so. Braden says he and his team have already isolated microbes with a quote, wide range of physiologies that are similarly unique and useful. And that includes other bacteria that are capable of grabbing carbon out of the air and still others that are associated with corals that appear to produce antibiotics.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah, in their efforts to prospect for microbes, it sounds like they've also had to travel to some pretty far flung places. I mean, you're mentioning deserts and volcanoes.

[Ari Daniel]

Yes, though not always, Emily. Actually, more recently, the team has turned their attention to our homes.

[Sponsor Announcer]

What?

[Ari Daniel]

Which you may well know, Emily, are full of microbes.

[Emily Kwong]

Do I know that?

[Ari Daniel]

Well, you do now.

[Doug Edmondson]

I mean, you run into slimes and goobs everywhere in my profession.

[Ari Daniel]

Chris Bure worked in facilities maintenance for years, including in Colorado, and he says it's inevitable that pipes clog and drip pans fill with snotty goo, which are often the telltale accumulation of microbes.

[Doug Edmondson]

I would just refer to it as.

[Ari Daniel]

Sludge, probably, but one person's sludge is another person's startup. Okay. Remember James Henriksen from earlier?

[Emily Kwong]

Oh, yeah. He's the guy who's like a birder, but for microbes.

[Ari Daniel]

That's the one. So James first got the idea to search for these sludges in the nooks and crannies of our homes when he ran across a paper that documented something that he says just had to be.

[Doug Edmondson]

Horrifying for the person and hilarious for the scientists. This person had slimy Tentacles that kept growing back out of their shower head.

[Emily Kwong]

Oh, that's gross.

[Ari Daniel]

That. Gotcha. And these sludges, while gross, may also have a silver lining.

[Emily Kwong]

How? How could they possibly.

[Doug Edmondson]

Well, weird, slimy things in showerheads, stuff growing in dishwashers, hot water heaters. They're really strange environments.

[Ari Daniel]

And these potentially extreme environments around our homes and under our noses have pressured microbes into finding ways of grabbing carbon to grow and survive.

[Emily Kwong]

So what I'm hearing from you, Ari, is that I do not have to clean as much because I'm building the next generation of planet saving sludge.

[Ari Daniel]

That's one interpretation, Emily. I'll give you another. And that is that these researchers are hopeful that something that perhaps holds a secret to reducing CO2 levels could well be living in your pipes.

[Emily Kwong]

Please come in.

[Ari Daniel]

So Rebecca Espinosa is among the community scientists offering up samples from their homes to the Two Frontiers Project for James Braden and their team to study. And they're letting us visit on this particular day.

[Emily Kwong]

So we're going downstairs.

[Ari Daniel]

She lives in Loveland, Colorado, about a half hour drive from Fort Collins. And Brayden has come to search her house for potentially planet saving sludge.

[Braden Tierney]

Okay, this is cool.

[Ari Daniel]

He samples a shower head, scraping for my microbial delicacies, and then he goes after a drain in her basement.

[Emily Kwong]

It looks really gross, but to a.

[Braden Tierney]

Microbiologist, it's very exciting.

[Ari Daniel]

Braden's team reached out to homeowners nationwide.

[Emily Kwong]

Can. Can I participate? Not a homeowner, but I definitely have some sludge.

[Ari Daniel]

Well, unfortunately, the project's now closed. But before they shut things down, they received over 70 curious snots and brews. As with all their samples, the researchers sequenced the DNA to census the microbes and determin whether any new species might be useful to us. Because hacking the adaptations of microbes for our purposes is complicated.

[Emily Kwong]

Microbes are amazing at what they do, but can we get their processes into.

[Sponsor Announcer]

A system that's economically competitive, that we can scale and deploy?

[Ari Daniel]

Lisa Stein is a climate change microbiologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. She says that scientists have been looking for novel microorganisms for decades, actually. So the Two Frontiers project is kind of like a shot in the dark. But she also told me that microbes are constantly evolving, and she hasn't seen anyone sample in the home like this before.

[Emily Kwong]

Kudos to them for having that idea. Like, that's. That's pretty innovative right there. Yeah, I kind of agree. Like, not all heroes wear capes, and they could be living in our houses, but. But it sounds like we won't be seeing them sold as products or on the market anytime soon.

[Ari Daniel]

Right. And I need to mention that the best way to bring down CO2 level probably won't be found in your shower head, but rather by reducing emissions, the largest of which remains transportation. And what's more, carbon capture efforts, at least so far, have proved to be energy intensive and difficult to scale. That's something that James told me too. This idea that the path from microbial discovery to widespread deployment is a long one.

[Doug Edmondson]

We have to be focused on things that can work in the real world, not just discovering organisms that are interesting for their own sake.

[Ari Daniel]

And so the hunt for a microbial marvel that can bail us out of our many, many messes continues.

[Emily Kwong]

Ari Daniel, thank you for coming on shortwave.

[Ari Daniel]

My pleasure. Anytime. Emily.

[Emily Kwong]

Shortwavers, if you like this episode, give us a follow. It really helps the show. Also, check out our episode on worm blobs found in toxic cave water and the hunt for future medicines in the ocean's depths. We'll link them in our episode notes.

[Ari Daniel]

And if you want to learn more about a new initiative from the Two Frontiers Project that you could get involved with, check out our show notes as well.

[Emily Kwong]

Thank you for listening to Short Wave from npr. See you next time.

[Sponsor Announcer]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. No idea where to Sell? Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. It is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a guru, garage entrepreneur, or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers. Go to Shopify.com NPR to take your business to the next level. Today in a divided America, a new trend is emerging among those on the political left.

[Ari Daniel]

After seeing J6, I started getting interested.

[Emily Kwong]

In getting some firearms training.

[Sponsor Announcer]

On the Sunday Story, meet the liberals, the people of color, and LGBTQ folks who are arming themselves because they fear more civil unrest. Listen now to the Sunday Story on the upverse podcast from NPR.