It’s no longer any secret that our skin and various mucusy surfaces are microbial zoos. So are our homes. What is less well known is what the individual species in those zoos look like and are doing. An early attempt to combat this ignorance has been cooked up by project frequent Sci Am guest blogger [...]

Consider this image: Is it a work from a modern-day Book of Kells? A Chinese seal? The cover of The Neverending Story?  No. Would you have guessed it is from a U.S. government publication? Here it is in its original context (don’t miss the caption!). Here’s another, of a free-living marine nematode called Draconema (see [...]

This curious creature, captured here under the microscope, is not a protist. It’s an animal. An animal, in fact, that can be smaller than some unicellular microbes. It’s a rotifer, and its stock in trade is sucking tiny prey to their doom. These multi-cellular micro-animals — which, let me emphasize again, are smaller than some [...]

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: I’m still away from the blog for a few weeks. In the meantime, here is another post from the Artful Amoeba archive. It originally appeared on October 4, 2010. I recently read a delightful leaflet on water bears which gave me a whole new appreciate for their anatomy (some of them have armored [...]

Last Thursday I received an email from the media coordinator for Scientific American about a brain-eating microbe. It’s not every day you get to answer the call of duty on one of those. Minnesota Public Radio had asked to interview me about a microorganism suspected in the death of a young boy in the state [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her ninth blog post. To track her research [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her eighth blog post. To track her research [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her seventh blog post. To track her research [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her fifth blog post. To track her research [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her fourth blog post. To track her research [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is a response to a question from a ScientificAmerican.com [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her third blog post. To track her research [...]

Editor’s Note: University of Southern California geobiologist Katrina Edwards is taking part in a three-week drilling project at the Atlantic’s North Pond—a sediment-filled valley on the ocean floor—designed to locate and study what she calls the “intraterrestrials”: the myriad microbial life-forms living inside Earth’s crust. This is her first blog post. To track her research [...]

Cover your mouth when you cough! We’ve all learned the hard way that microbial organisms, from bacteria to viruses, can be transported by air. But the extent to which organisms exist in the Earth’s atmosphere is only now becoming clear. There is good evidence that bacteria (or bacterial spores) can help nucleate water condensation, seeding [...]

Two and a half miles beneath the surface of Antarctica’s central Eastern ice sheet is a body of water 160 miles by 30 miles across known as Lake Vostok, after the Vostok research station above it, built by the former Soviet Union in 1957 and now operated by Russia. Even by Antarctic standards it’s a [...]

The U.S. has spent several billion dollars looking for life on other planets. Shouldn’t we spend at least that much finding and identifying life on Earth? That is the argument behind a taxonomy analysis by a trio of scientists in Science, published on January 25. They argue just $500 million to $1 billion a year [...]

Tetracycline—a powerful antibiotic—came from the soil. Researchers isolated the drug, used to treat everything from sexually transmitted diseases to bacterial pneumonia, from the soil-dwelling microbe Septomyces aureofaciens, which produces tetracycline to kill its microbe neighbors. So it comes as no surprise that other soil microbes have evolved ways to resist this antibiotic But a new [...]

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 [...]

Personal oral hygiene notwithstanding, your mouth is sloshing with hundreds of species of microorganisms. Most are harmless, but some can do real damage, such as causing periodontitis, in which the microbes that cause plaque get below the gum line, leading to inflammation and infection. Researchers have had a tough time sorting out all of these [...]

Cheese is carefully rotted milk, an ancient domestication of microbial activities for human consumption. Humans work in concert with communities of bacteria and fungi to produce the hundreds of different kinds of cheeses, flavored by the metabolic excretions of microbes eating the sugars, proteins, and fats in the milk. The ecologies of cheese provide a [...]

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 [...]