Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. The range for selections [...]

In the 1970s, an obscure scientist named Carl Woese (pronounced “woes”) was working on something apparently rather mundane: finding a way to classify bacteria. Though that may seem a straightforward task, bacteria had stubbornly resisted all previous attempts. The traditional method — looking at differences in appearance, structure, and metabolism and sort of eyeballing it [...]

In this photograph are elegant, microscopic agents of death. They are crystals made not of minerals, but of protein, and are found not in vugs, but in guts. Bug guts. They are Cry protein crystals made by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. You may know them better as Bt toxin. Bt toxin has gotten a lot [...]

As the titles of journal articles go, it’s hard to find one more elegant, enticing and — notably, if you’ve been in the business long — succinct than “Gliding Ghosts of Mycoplasma mobile“. Jules Verne short story? Steampunk Western? No. This was the title of an article in “Cell Biology” back in 2005. But the [...]

Blogger’s Note: As I’m on vacation this week, today I present a post from the archive at theartfulamoeba.com. This post originally appeared on my blog on Feb. 14, 2010. Enjoy! Vibrio cholerae is a bacterium of surprising adaptability, tenacity, and Olympic-class swimming ability. Cholera bacteria can swim in both freshwater and saltwater (a feat most [...]

In July 1976, a convention of members of the American Legion — a veterans’ group — was meeting in Philadelphia at the Belleville Stratford Hotel in honor of America’s bicentennial. Soon, 221 attendees would be sickened and 34 dead of an illness it was believed no one had ever seen before. Swine flu was suspected, [...]

Just days after Sci Am published my story on the “bleeding” bacterium Serratia marcescens, a friend sent me this video, in which the marketing department behind the film “Contagion” up north apparently decided to go super-geek and cook up something delightful. Science as art, my friends. Way, way cool, boys. In addition to Serratia, which [...]

Over on the news side today is an article I put together for Scientific American Online on some mysterious, ubiquitous, and sometimes-deadly red bacteria that are probably at this moment living in your shower grout and contact lens case. Plus, when slime molds eat them, their plasmodia turn red like flamingoes eating shrimp turn pink. [...]

If it goes around on six legs, it doesn’t get much dowdier than the mealybug 1. Powdery, bovine, and frightening if you find them binging on your gardenias, these wax-shedding roving syringes are one of many mosquito-like parasites that plague plants. Yes, sexy, mealybugs are not — unless you look inside them. There, you will [...]

There’s a food fight in your guts. Not the Tater-Tot-chucking, spoonful-of-mashed potato-flinging, melee-in-the-cafeteria type of food fight. Rather, your intestines are the site of an ancient and complex war between your own cells and trillions of bacteria—a war over what happens to your food as it moves through your body. Some of the bacteria form [...]

A new truth about Lady Gaga’s health has recently been revealed. She is covered in other life-forms—“her little monsters” you might call them. Contrary to statements otherwise in the media, these life-forms have nothing to do with Lady Gaga’s meat bikini. (For those who need the extra explanation, Lady Gaga is perhaps the most popular [...]

Image: The starfish-shaped EZ-open structure of mimivirus, above, and the gray DNA-containing nucleocapsid inside, below. The nucleocapsid has plenty of room to breathe and a concave depression, not unlike the dimple on the Death Star, that always faces the "starfish". From PLoS Biology. In 1992, scientists sampled the water from a cooling tower in Bradford, [...]

Sophia Kathariou is the kind of scientist who can turn food-borne bacteria into great dinner conversation. The associate professor of food science and microbiology at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C., spoke about her work Thursday night at Mitch’s Tavern, a longtime haunt for professors and students alike. The talk was one of Sigma Xi’s [...]

Bacteria may be single celled organisms but they very rarely exist as single cells on their own. Instead, bacteria form colonies made up of many cells, all growing and dividing together. These colonies are often ordered in shape and form and various physical systems have been created to model this self-organisation; for example small vibrating [...]

From the point of view of an intracellular bacteria, the human body really is no more than just a habitat in which they must grow and thrive. While this particular habitat might have stable internal conditions, and less competition than the big open world, it has its disadvantages in continuous attacks from the immune system, and the [...]

Although it usually only gets talked about when it starts causing problems, cholesterol is an important molecule to have in the body, as it is a component of cell membranes. The major component of cell membranes is a molecule called a phospholipid; an inorganic phosphate molecule joined onto lipid tails. Lots of these phospholipids all [...]

There are various different ways that pathogenic bacteria can damage and kill human cells, but one of the most common is by the production of toxic molecules. These small molecules are made inside the bacterial cell, the protein chain built using the DNA template and then often modified within the cell before being secreted directly [...]

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 [...]

For free-living organisms, the ability to sense and respond to the outside environment is crucial for survival. Eukaryotes, such as animals and plants, often have highly complex network systems in place to monitor their surroundings and respond effectively, but bacteria have developed a remarkably simple system. It’s called the ‘Two Component System’ because it literally [...]

Milk is produced by mammals in order to provide nutrition to their growing young. It’s pretty special stuff, as not only does it provide all the nutrients and energy needed to fuel a growing baby (consider that for at least six months a human infant drinks nothing but milk) it also aids in the development [...]

Any part of the human body that is open to the outside world it available for the colonisation of bacteria. While this blog has covered bacteria in the gut, the vagina and the throat, one area I’ve neglected to cover is the bacteria that get into the lungs. As the company I currently work for [...]

I’m on holiday at the moment, so this post is adapted from the archives. It was originally posted at my old blog over on Field of Science. There are lots of things I enjoy about studying bacteria. I love their biochemistry and the secret inner workings of their metabolic pathways. I love that everything they [...]

Along with the main elements of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, magnesium and sulphur, organic organisms also require trace amounts of certain other elements, including some metals. The most useful thing about the metals required by the body is that their outer electron orbitals are very close together, making it easy for them to both accept and [...]

A funny thing happened recently on the way to Mars. A few days after the successful launch of NASA’s behemoth Curiosity rover with its Mars Science Laboratory instruments on November 26th 2011, a somewhat muted piece of news came out admitting that the strict biological planetary protection rules had not been adhered to quite as [...]

Scientists are great at growing E. coli in the lab. They know exactly under which conditions various strains thrive. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be learned from the bacteria’s behavior in an ideal, isolated and ultimately unrealistic environment. That is why a group of researchers at the University of California, Riverside, decided [...]

Bacteria, viruses and parasites from land animals such as cats, cows and humans are sickening and killing sea mammals. Scientists have been finding a daunting number of land-based pathogens in seals, dolphins, sharks and other ocean dwellers that wash ashore dead or dying, according to an article by Christopher Solomon in the May 2013 issue [...]

Sample a hurricane’s air from a plane high in the stratosphere and, in addition to the expected water and grit, you’ll find an abundance of microbes. Swept up from land and sea by the tropical cyclone’s power, the skyborne bacteria persist in the atmosphere for days—and some may even thrive there. A new survey of [...]

Bacteria hiding in the lungs might not be able to hide much longer. Although traditional tests can take days or weeks to culture to determine the presence of certain harmful bacteria—such as those that cause tuberculosis—a much more rapid technique for detecting lung infections might be on the horizon. Researchers have developed a test that [...]

The most commonly acquired sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S., chlamydia and gonorrhea, are usually cleared out swiftly and easily with a dose of oral antibiotics. But one of these infections is growing bold and finding ways to evade treatment. More than 321,000 cases of gonorrhea are reported each year in the U.S. alone—and [...]

Some strains of nasty bacterial infections, such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), come loaded with resistance to antibiotics built right into their genes. But certain infections seem to acquire an ability to persist in the face of drugs that should knock them out—without developing the genetic hallmarks of antibiotic resistance. For decades, researchers have thought [...]

Americans have been on an antibacterial kick for the past several years. Our hand soap, dish soap, and body wash have morphed into an arsenal of bug-killing napalm, eliminating all but the heartiest of bacteria. And there are, indeed, some scary microbes crawling around out there—Staph and C. Diff, just to name a couple. But [...]

Whenever I stay in a hotel room, I’m a little wary of the throw pillows, a bit skittish about the television remote and would never even consider taking a bath. Perhaps I’m being overly paranoid, but as a slight germaphobe, I figure it doesn’t hurt to be a little cautious. New preliminary research vindicates at [...]

The relationship between food and a gastro-intestinal disease might sound simple. But new research is revealing that what we put into our bodies can cause a cascade of complex interactions among various systems—from metabolism to the immune system—that keep us well or make us sick. And it appears that a popular component of the classic [...]

What is the dirtiest thing on your desk? If you work in a typical office, it’s not actually your computer mouse or your keyboard or even your desk. According to a new study, published online May 30 in PLoS ONE, it’s your phone—but your chair’s not far behind. Before you drop that receiver or leap [...]

Bacteria are single celled organisms that can do amazing things in multicellular groups, with complex coordinated behaviors emerging from the interaction of genetic networks, chemical environments, and the physics of cell growth. Last year I wrote about the work of Tim Rudge and Fernan Federici and their incredible images of bacterial growth patterns. Their paper, [...]

The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake, stretching 35 miles along the San Andreas fault about 150 miles east of Los Angeles and 200 feet below sea level. It is surrounded by harsh desert as well as productive agricultural land irrigated by water from the Colorado River and draining back into the Sea. The Salton [...]

I take a lot of photos of bacteria on my phone, and sometimes I use those pictures as my phone’s wallpaper. These photos are meta-phone bacteria wallpapers: photographs of bacteria that I collected off the surface of my phone (h/t to Nick for the microbial inspiration). To sample the phone’s microbiome I simply placed it [...]

I got a really fun early Christmas gift yesterday, Moyasimon 1: Tales of Agriculture, a manga series about a boy who can see microbes. His skills lead to some exciting fermentation-related adventures at his agriculture college. I learned a lot about miso, sake, and meats that ferment underground! The microbes are super cute, and it [...]

Bacteria make a lot of smells, mostly ones that we’d rather not think about. The hundreds of volatile compounds that bacterial cultures produce can signal many things, although I’m probably one of very few people who associate the smell of warm E. coli with pleasant lab memories rather than some kind of a hygiene disaster. [...]

Take a look at what some clever American teens have come up with as an idea for an experiment on the International Space Station!     The 60 global  finalists for the YouTube.com/SpaceLab competition were announced Tuesday, January 17th.  Recall from my post in November, that YouTube challenged 14-18 year-old students to design a science [...]

The July/August issue of Scientific American Mind made its debut online late last week. Here I divulge some of the more surprising and useful lessons from its pages. Dozing Dangerously Sleepwalking is one of the strangest phenomena I have ever witnessed. Despite its name, it doesn’t resemble any other kind of sleep I’ve seen. To [...]

Bringing sciart to the public isn’t always an easy task – and the growing (culturing, har har) field of bioart is some of the toughest art to showcase of all. It’s harder than hanging a painting without using nails, as many contemporary galleries insist, leading to those dangling chains from ceiling braces. Bioart, the field [...]

Scientists collect crazy things. I’m not talking thimble-crazy or frog-themed-crazy. That kind of tchotchke barely ranks on the crazy scale. The collections I’m talking about are things like bellybutton lint, whale vomit, and human poo. You mean raw sewage?! Yes, sort of… but straight from the source. Fresh, unadulterated. Yup. And to supersize the irony, [...]

What happens when you take a bag of sweaty hockey gear and throw it in a vat of beer for a week? I’m not sure (although I’m sure this must have been tried before), but a researcher and an artist at the University of Western Australia are trying their own fermented fashion experiment. Using a [...]