December turned out to be a rather hectic month for several reasons, so I decided to take a break from blogging. Now the holidays are over, I will back to regular blogging for 2013! In a previous post I wrote about how two-component systems evolved in bacteria while dying out in animals, so for this [...]

Over the last year, it’s become more and more apparent that I do, in fact, have recurrent cystitis. Having cystitis is a bit like entering the matrix – until I had my first attack I’d never even known it was a disease. It doesn’t appear in books, films or classroom lessons (particularly given that my [...]

I’ve written before about the many ways that bacteria can move around. Considering that they’re just one cell long, micro-organisms have a whole range of ways to travel through their little world. Movement is useful for finding food and for changing your environment when all nearby resources have been exhausted. For bacteria that can’t move, however, [...]

I’m currently off on my seriously-delayed honeymoon, so over the next two weeks I’ll be sticking up some posts I enjoyed from my old blog. They’ve been modified and re-edited to include new information (and images!) where appropriate, but unfortunately I won’t be able to answer comments or participate in any discussion about them until [...]