Small Things Considered

Cryptic Oddballs

by Jamie | Readers, sharpen your pencils and put on your secret decoder rings. We need you to crack these cryptograms! Read more →

The Way Up and The Way Down

by Elio | I admit to not having paid much attention to the mechanisms that plants and animals use to stand up straight, or, in the case of plants, also to descend into the soil. Yet, on reflection, the skill in detecting the effect of gravity, now called gravitropism, the older term being geotropism, is essential for life. Read more →

Good Reading: Bacterial communication through electrical signaling

by Ananya Sen | Bacterial biofilms are microbial communities within which individual cells communicate with each other. Establishing a biofilm, coordinating biofilm growth in response to nutrient availability, and interspecies interactions, all depend on communication. Read more →

Fungomania III. Everybody Talks About the Weather But Mushrooms Do Something About It.

by Elio | We finish our Fungomania series of this year with a question: Why when you feel the cap of a mushroom in the woods, does it feel cool and somewhat moist? Read more →

Fungomania II. The Humongousest Fungus

by Elio | We dealt with a monster fossil fungus before. In the interest of expediency, let me reprint part of what I said: "Several museums pos­sess specimens of a cylindrical organism named Prototaxites  whose tree-like trunks measure up to 8 meters long by 1 meter wide. Protota­xites  dated from approximately 420 to 350 million... Read more →

Fungomania I. The Yeast and the Bee.

by Elio | Fungomania returns… In keeping with what we did a year ago, we offer three consecutive fungal posts. I have earlier professed sharing with many a fascination for symbioses (see here). I still don’t know why this is, perhaps it’s simply because multiple genomes interacting are more exciting than one. Read more →

Pictures Considered #45. A Gauze Bandage

by Christoph | What resembles a snippet of a gauze ban­dage, a fabric made by the 'warp and weft' tech­ni­que of weav­ing on a loom, is ac­tu­al­ly an elec­tron-mi­cro­sco­pic pic­ture of a frag­ment of the sheath of the ar­chae­on Me­tha­no­trix con­ci­lii that grows in fi­la­ments si­mi­lar to many cy­a­no­bac­te­ria. The pic­ture – I see it as a piece... Read more →

Flagellar Motors: How a Bacterium Shakes its Groove Thing

by Mike Delmont | Many things in our lives are so common that we take them for granted, forgetting their remarkable complexity. These can range from the social microbiology involved in cheese making, to the physics behind the internal combustion engine, or the anato­my/physiology behind taking a couple of steps Read more →

Talmudic Question #152

With the widespread use of alcohol-based disinfectants (hand dispensers seem to be all over), can you conceive of a bacterium becoming resistant other than by making spores? Read more →