Small Things Considered

A Revisionist History of Science

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... Read more →

Talmudic Question #196

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... Read more →

On drums: Escherichia coli

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... Read more →

Pictures Considered #57 : Coloring a Cell

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... Read more →

Magnificently long : Thiomargarita magnifica

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... Read more →

Bacterial Range Expansion

by Davide Ciccarese  
This image I cap­tured of a re­sult of mine re­minds me of how im­port­ant it is to keep one's mind open and let the re­sults speak for them­selves, even after mak­ing a mis­take. As part of my re­search I was con­duct­ing du­ring my PhD with Da­vid John­son and Dani Or, I was in­ter­est­ed in study­ing... Read more →

Nailing the twists of a twisted nails puzzle, part 2|2

by Christoph  
I had almost solved the twisted nails puzzle in the first part. I had untwisted the function of the first nail, spot 42 RNA, as well as the function of the second nail, the open reading frame contained within this 'dual‑function RNA' that is translated as the SpfP protein. Here now are two more twists… Read more →

A Microbiology Picture Book

by Janie  
Here's a fun way to get little ones interested in microbiology. In Wonderful World of the Small: A First Book of Microbiology, Lindsey Millar and Vivien Sárkány introduce the diversity of microbes on Earth. They present an anthropomorphized cast of different types of microbes... Read more →

Nailing the twists of a twisted nails puzzle, part 1|2

by Christoph  
I recently mentioned in passing that "...one is poking a wasps' nest when studying cAMP·CRP re­gu­lat­ed genes." Are you ready to do some poking with me? Well, in a back corner of said wasp's nest lies a twisted nails puzzle, the solution to which I will reveal here. You would be right... Read more →