New Bacterium Lives On Caffeine

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "A newly-described species of bacterium, Pseudomonas putida has been found to live on pure caffeine. The little jaspers metabolize caffeine into carbon dioxide and ammonia. They were found living in a flower bed on the University of Iowa campus, not in the drain of an espresso machine as one might expect. The paper presenting the research will be presented at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in New Orleans this month where caffeine metabolism will have to contend with the traditional ethanol metabolism."

Comments

Newly described

[FrootLoops]

Nitpick: it's "newly described species", not "newly-described species". A hyphen is used to separate multiple adjectives when they modify the same noun. The word "newly" is an adverb, so it's clear that it modifies the adjective "described". The hyphen is used to disambiguate: "fifteen minute presentations" could be grouped either as "fifteen (minute presentations)" or "(fifteen minute) presentations". If the latter was meant, "fifteen-minute presentations" makes that clear.

I sometimes add the hyphen myself on accident, but it's not necessary.