Friendly bacteria fight the flu : Nature News
“Neomycin-sensitive bacteria naturally present in the mice’s bodies provided a trigger that led to the production of T cells and antibodies that cou...
Category: Science
Microbiopolitics and the Post-Pasteurian Age
Cross posted from my new fledgling blog Practical Microbes I can’t believe that I haven’t written about this amazing paper from MIT anthropologist, Heather Paxs...
The Deep Carbon Observatory: Going underground | The Economist
“Current estimates suggest that half of all the living matter on Earth lives underground, at depths of up to 5km. Some people think the share may be bigge...
Kickstarting a great new documentary
I'm a film hack. Yeah, some of my short vids have hundreds of thousands of views or even millions, and some (nameless) have contributed to big donations, b...
Are scientists afraid of blogs and tweets?
Nature has a nice wee article (no subscription required to read this one, FTW!) on the state of what one might call “informal” peer review – t...
Human microbial ecology – cool study
I mentioned a few weeks back a review in Nature about a trio of scientists studying the contributions of gut microbial ecology in preemies that get necrotizing ...
Doing stand-up at IgniteAmherst Feb 8th
Just a note that I'll be doing a 5-minute stand-up act at IngiteAmherst at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (125 West Bay Road, Amherst, MA). Link...
Functional roles for noise in genetic circuits
I have a thing about noise (see my ramblings here). And as folks try to turn elements of biological circuits into well-behaving engineered parts, I’ve been tryi...
The subtlety of life – clever codon usage
Here’s a paper from September I haven’t had a chance to comment on. Zhang et al reported in Science (review, paper – subscription required) how two almost...
Co-operative evolution of the immune system in humans?
Lee and Mazmanian, from Caltech, published this great review in Science on microbes in the gut and how different bacteria might have been involved in the evolut...