Small Things Considered

The Secrets of Ancient Beer

by Gillian Belk
With the Octoktoberfest themed beers flowing all season, it seemed only appropriate to have a post about the marvels of this delightful frothy beverage Read more →

Vaccines and the Fight Against Antibiotic Resistance

by Roberto | For the vast majority of the natural history of Homo sa­piens, some 200,000 years, the average life expectancy at birth has been around 30 years. What I find most amazing is that as recently as 1900 the world average human life expectancy at birth had remained unchanged. Read more →

From the Classroom

Dr. Melanie Armstrong, of Western Colorado University, got a message, which reminded us of our Talmudic Questions... Read more →

The Truth Is In The Outcome

by Elio | Coprolites - fossil feces - are nothing short of a marvel. A message from the past, they divulge important information about what their makers lived on as well as on how they lived Read more →

Apuleius's Ass

STC bloggers | Elio: I am toying with an idea for a TQ but don't want to make an ass of myself (again, see TQ #155!). It has to do with the mechanism of genome reduction in endosymbionts. I find that little has been said on how it comes about, but most of the inference is that it's due to... Read more →

How to Build a Giant Winogradsky Column

by Scott Chimileski | In part one of my tour of the Microbial Life exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH), I wrote that the microscopy station and the live bacterial colonies are my personal favorites. Actually, those are my second and third favorites. I was saving my "most favorite" exhibit for its very own post: a giant-sized, living and changing Winogradsky column. Read more →

The Microbial Life Exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History

by Scott Chimileski | In late 2015, I wrote an STC post about plans for a microbial exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. That article, Bringing the Microbial World into Our Natural History Museums, and another written at ASM.org in 2016, Age of the Microzoo, describe the background and motivation behind the exhibition. Now, I am pleased to share with the STC audience... Read more →

Microbe 2018

by Elio | I recently attended the ASM Microbe 2018 meeting in Atlanta and have a short report to make. I went to my first such meeting as a graduate student in 1952 and to many others subsequently, so this was hardly a new experience for me. Read more →

Summer Vacation

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 2nd ! Read more →

No hiding among the trees: forensic phylogenetics

by Jamie Henzy | Some 50 years ago, Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling proposed that molecules could be read as "documents of evolutionary history". The molecules to which they referred were proteins, and the sequence of the amino acids that specified each. Read more →