Small Things Considered

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 →

On your marks, get set, go!

by Christoph | When did you first hear about the "ge­ne­tic code" ? In high school ? Or in col­lege, in an un­der­gra­du­ate course in mo­le­cu­lar bio­lo­gy and/or ge­ne­tics ? In either case you were cer­tain­ly shown the fa­mous co­don table that spe­ci­fies which of the 64 pos­sible trip­lets in mes­sen­ger RNA (mRNA) are trans­la­ted in­to one of the 20 ca­no­ni­cal... Read more →

Mono Lake (a Snippet)

by Elio | Travel down the eastern slope of California's Sierra Nevada and you will run into a number of breathtaking sights. Ranking high among them is Mono Lake, a large shallow lake that sports a collection of strange limestone columns. Protruding some 30 feet above the water surface, these structures, known as chimneys, consist of calcium carbonate... Read more →

How Bacteria on our Skin Might Prevent Skin Cancer

by Jammal Abu-khazneh and Chih-Kai Yang | The skin is the largest organ in the human body and is home to diverse microbial communities. While this may be unsettling for some germophobes, recent work has uncovered potential health benefits from bacteria that are part of our normal skin microbiomes. 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 →

To The Bottom of the Sea

by Elio | Are there instances of water-containing sites on Earth that (pardon the expression) have not yet been metagenomicized? Surely many remain, but their numbers must be dwindling quite rapidly. Read more →

Talmudic Question #157

by Jacob Bobonis
Is there is such a thing as a taxon-characteristic pathway/feature that cannot be transferred in bacteria? Read more →

The Human Story, as Told by Our Genomes

by Jamie | As one of our wiser bloggers put it, "I doubt that STC readers are fo­cus­ed on­ly on mi­cro­bio­lo­gy. They must have other in­terests too." With that in­sight in mind, we're of­fer­ing up our im­pres­sions of a couple of books on­ly tan­gent­ial­ly re­la­ted to mi­cro­bes. In this case, a book de­scr­ibing the in­crea­sing­ly de­tail­ed pic­ture... Read more →