Welcome to Small Things Considered! This blog shares the excitement of unexpected and unusual stories of the microbial world. The main contributors to this blog are listed on your right. But we do not just publish our own content, we have many contributions from students, postdocs, and others. We enjoy this, in part because theirs is a world where scientific communication will increasingly involve social media. And this blog is a social medium. Don’t think that we do this to avoid work. We are dedicated editors who spend a lot of time going over the material we receive. We are eager to hear from you, so send us your comments, criticisms, submissions, ideas, or whatever else comes into your mind. Thank you for visiting.
by the STC team We are taking our customary two week vacation. Do you think we deserve it ? Looking forward to seeing you again on July 4th !
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by Roberto ...This provided the perfect opportunity to dive into the life of this noted microbiologist. Alice Evans (1881–1975) made some of most important contributions to microbiology in the early 20th century. In 1917 she presented her work showing that a bacterium found in raw milk – Bacillus abortus, now...
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by Nastassja Noell Lichens are symbiotic organisms – algae, fungi, cyanobacteria, bacteria and yeasts – that form miniature ecosystems that you can hold in the palm of your hand. They live on trees and rocks throughout the Southern Appalachians, and are also found in the Arctic, the Antarctic, rainforests, alpine tundra and especially in the desert.
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by George A. O’Toole Roberto Kolter, after over 20 years of service, has decided to step away as the cover editor at the Journal of Bacteriology (JB), and I want to take this opportunity to both thank him and to reflect. When Roberto started as cover editor, the front of JB...
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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...
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The establishment of an oxygen-respiring bacterium in the cytoplasm of an archeon might have given rise to the eukaryotes. What was the first adaptive trait...
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by Christoph "Light funky groove with a rolling snare pattern and occasional fills, syncopated wood block and percussive hand‑drum and rolling conga pattern" describes a particular drum pattern (#15) by acclaimed Nigerian master drummer Tony Allen. But don't worry, you didn't stumble into the drums section...
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by Christoph Our ability to visually perceive and discriminate is always slighly overwhelmed by black-and-white images. Especially, of course, when the objects depicted are outside our trained, familiar size spectrum, such as bacterial cells and their innards. Take for example Figure 1, the cryo-ET image of a tiny...
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by Christoph Microbiologists study microbes with microscopes because they are not visible to the naked eye. Unless they are. This was exactly the case for "Candidatus Thiomargarita magnifica", described in a recent BioRχiv preprint by Vollard et al. (2022): "A centimeter-long bacterium with DNA compart..." (more about the second part of the title...
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The purpose of this blog is to share our appreciation for the width and depth of the microbial activities on this planet. We will emphasize the unusual and the unexpected phenomena for which we have a special fascination... (more)