Soil May Help Pathogens Make Us Sick
August 30th, 2012 |
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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 [...]
Keep reading »Soil Inspired Cuisine
I’m fascinated by the biology of soil and the history of “dirtiness”–where dirt and bacteria are allowed to be and where we must clean them away. Mary Douglas defines dirt in her classic book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo as “matter out of place”: [Dirt] is a relative idea. [...]
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High Speed Video Reveals How Meteor and Missile Impacts Transfer Energy Via Sand and Dirt Grains
December 11th, 2012 |
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When a high speed object collides with force, we tend to focus on the spectacular (yet potentially devastating) view from a macro scale, but Duke scientists have been researching what that incredible energy transfer looks like at the level of sand and dirt size particles. “High-speed video of projectiles slamming into a bed of disks [...]
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