Welcome to the Quanta Audio Edition.

In each of these bi-weekly episodes, we bring you a story direct from the Quanta website

about developments in basic science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn't be able to do.

It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

How and why can you have cells that breathe two ways?

That's next.

Check out this feed every Tuesday for the Quanta podcast.

That's where editor-in-chief Samir Patel talks to our writers and editors about more of Quanta's most popular, interesting, and thought-provoking stories. Take a deep breath. A flow of air has rushed into your lungs, where the oxygen

moves into your bloodstream, fueling metabolic fires and cells throughout your body.

You, being an aerobic organism, use oxygen as the cellular spark that

frees molecular energy from the food you eat. But not all organisms on the planet live or breathe

this way. Instead of using oxygen to harvest energy, many single-celled life forms that live in

environments far from oxygen's reach,

such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents or stygian crevices in the soil, use other elements to

respire and unlock energy. This physical separation of the oxygen-rich and oxygen-free worlds is not merely a matter of life utilizing

available resources. It's a biochemical necessity. Oxygen doesn't play nice with the metabolic

pathways that make it possible to respire with the use of other elements, such as sulfur or

manganese. It gives aerobes like us life, but for many anorobes or creatures that respire without oxygen,

oxygen is a toxin that reacts with and damages their specialized molecular machinery.

Courtney Stairs, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University in Sweden, says,

...