by Elio
The American Academy of Microbiology has just announced the release of its newest colloquium report, The Uncharted Microbial World: Microbes and their Activities in the Environment. This report, based on a series of discussions by experts in the field of microbiology, explores the mysteries of the microbial world.
It makes for very good reading.
We present here a lightly annotated list that includes most of our posts from the past half year...
by Elio — Your Next Data Storage Device May Be a Spore. "E=mc2 1905!" has been encoded in the DNA of Bacillus subtilis. Quotation marks, superscript, exclamation points, and all. All it took was to encrypt the text of that famous formula as a DNA base sequence, to synthesize a snippet of DNA...
by Roberto — In the last few years, immunotherapy has quickly become the emerging "fourth pillar" in cancer treatment, joining surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. The basic concept behind the development of immune checkpoint inhibitors as anti-cancer therapeutics is that activating the immune system can sometimes result in the body ridding itself of malignant cells.
by Elio and Roberto — This coming Sunday, December 1st, we'll be celebrating the thirteenth birthday of STC. Now a teenager! The blog has matured to over 1300 posts, two per week with virtually no interruptions. This is something that makes us very happy. When we think about it, if we were to print all those posts on standard letter size paper...
by Christoph — Winogradsky ─ you rightly expect the name of Sergei Winogradsky (1856–1953) to come up occasionally in a blog that Considers Small Things. But Rothko ? One of the luminaries of post-WWII abstract expressionism in the US, the Latvian‑American painter Mark Rothko (1903─1970) is best known for...
by Janie — Whether read or listened to, a story is essentially a colorless armature made of words, and it's up to each reader/listener to interpret it, imagine it, and people it with appearances, colors, movements, emotions. The process depends upon the individual's own experiences, since all things present...
Do they write about nanobacteria?
I have a question...
I noticed a contaminated plate in my incubator. This foreign yellow microorganism seemed to follow a crack in the agar (the plate was old). I thought that was interesting.
So I got a plate and put a series of cuts into the agar from one side of the plate to the other, then streaked perpendicular to the cuts at one side of the plate. Sure enough, the yellow microorganism followed the cuts away from the streaks. In fact, it looked like they formed colonies along the streak. I assume they are following a moisture gradient. Have you ever seen anything like that or know what microorganism this might be?
John,
I can't say that I have seen this phenomenon, but perhaps I was good at throwing out my used plates before they dried out! Perhaps someone else reading this can help.
Elio
This brought Roger Stanier's ELASTICOTAXIS observations to mind. The individual who wrote ought to be told of this phenomenon! In addition, when I saw the several comments about being amazed by unusual aspects of bacteria I was reminded of the late Jackson Foster's paraphrasing of the Ladies Home Journal's "motto"–Never Underestimate the Power of the Microbe. He used it quite often, and it seems more apt than ever!