by Elio — At the year's end, the media have been paying special attention to microbes. Newspapers, radio, and TV have found microbial stories worthy of their attention. Practically everyone who listens to or reads any sort of media must know by now... Read more →
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Talmudic Question #4.1
Stan Maloy asks: Both of the scenarios proposed by David Lipson in answer to TQ #4 make perfect sense, but they only focus on bacteria external to plants and animals (as prompted in the question). However, you could also ask what... Read more →
Talmudic Question #4
What if all the bacteria and archaea on Earth decided to go on strike and stop their metabolism all at once? Which of the global cycles of matter would be affected first? Read more →
In a Cavern, in a Canyon….
by Elio — Certain large underground caverns owe their majesty to the biochemical action of tiny bacteria. In many parts of the world, caverns are formed by the dissolution of calcium carbonate deposits by sulfuric acid (this is known in the trade as “sulfuric acid speleogenesis”). Such microbial mining formed the... Read more →
Talmudic Question #3
Why are no bacterial pathogens known to use a Bdellovibrio-type of mechanism to penetrate into eukaryotic cells? Read more →
Gifts from Above
by Elio — Creatures living at the bottom of the sea get much of their food from those that lived above and died. This biological detritus slowly descends to the sea floor. In the language of the trade, "pelagic organisms are a trophic resource for benthic ones" Marine scientists Dell’Anno and Danovaro... Read more →
Talmudic Question #2
Why have nitrogen-fixing bacterial endosymbionts of plants not evolved into organelles (“azoplasts”)? Read more →
An Illuminating Notion
by Elio — I just love it when two fascinating topics cross paths. Two that I have in mind now are bioluminescence and photoreactivation. Bioluminescence is an old phenomenon, first recognized when humans first encountered fireflies... Read more →
Talmudic Question #1
Where on Earth would one expect to find a single species of microbes (a pure culture) for sustained periods of time? Read more →
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
by Elio — It’s not that many years ago that most people, me included, thought that bacteria lacked the ability to sense chemical gradients, communicate with one another, make fancy multicellular structures (with a few notable exceptions), and do some of the other things attributed to “higher” organisms. How things have... Read more →