Small Things Considered

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 →

The Loss of An Old Army Buddy

by Elio | Allan Campbell died recently, and science lost an eminent microbial geneticist. He discovered truly central mechanisms in phage biology, for example, how temperate phage integrate into the genome of their host and how they exit from it (the Campbell Model). And I lost a treasured pal, as Allan and I were... Read more →

felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas

by Elio | "Happy is he who was able to know the causes of things" is a statement by the Latin poet Virgil (70 – 19 BCE) that I have carried with me for some years. I don't mean to suggest that I had a classical education, although I might have acquired one had my family not have to... Read more →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – Eliobacter woosyi

by the STC team | We have the great pleasure to inform you, our Readers, that a team of microbiologists has privileged us with a peek into a draft of the first formal description ever offered of a particular bacterium that has puzzled microbiologists for almost a century. For the bacterium, they propose the name Eliobacter woosyi, and as they... Read more →

Lunar … Life?

by Gillian Belk | Four months after the first moon landing in 1969, astronauts from the Apollo 12 mission, Charles "Pete" Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordan returned from the second moon landing. From the lunar surface the astronauts traveled back to Earth with moon rocks, moon soil, the Surveyor III television camera, and something remarkable. Read more →

Microbes Make the Most of Milk

by Rachel Diner | For the first year of our lives most of what we eat is milk. In fact, during the first four months it is the only thing we eat. For mothers, both breast milk and formula are popular options for getting a baby nourished, and while both breast milk and formula have the essentials needed to survive,... Read more →

More on "How to Tell Up And Down"

by Alexander Weitzel | The process I will be discussing is plant gravitropism, the ability of higher plants to sense the vector in which gravity is acting and grow parallel to that vector, either in the positive direction (shoots and leaves) or in the negative direction (roots). Read more →

STC's Messy 'Search' Function...

by the STC team | As much as we prefer to talk about the Small Things there are instances where we have to consider how to find them in the first place, here in our blog. Turns out this is a nuisance when using our search function, which is prominently placed at the top of the right column... Read more →

Cryptic Oddballs

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