Small Things Considered

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 →

Stan Falkow, a Modern Koch

by Elio | Let's risk an exaggeration. Stanley Falkow, whose recent death we mourn, could be called the modern embodiment of Robert Koch. The risk here seems reasonable because the parallels are remarkable. Like Koch, Falkow started a whole school of research, this one focused on molecular bacterial pathogenesis. Read more →

Charles Yanofsky RIP

by Cathy Squires | The death of Stanford's Charley Yanofsky on March 2018 at age 92 marks a significant punctuation mark in the history of genetics and molecular biology. Charley was a remarkable person in all aspects of life, including in his interactions with family, friends, colleagues, students, and postdocs. Truly a man of many talents... Read more →