The near-boiling pools of Octopus Spring in Yellowstone National Park are ringed with microbial mats - highly organized communities where photosynthetic cyanobacteria serve as the main power plants. Researchers have found that the single-celled cyanobacterium Synechococcus drops its day job of photosynthesis, and surprisingly fixes nitrogen gas (N2) into biologically useful compounds at night. Credit: Carnegie Institution
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