Small Things Considered

Teachers Corner: The Name for the Small Things We Consider

by Elio & Roberto | As microbiology teachers, ma­ny of us de­light in re­tel­ling the 17th cen­tu­ry sto­ry of Leeu­wen­hoek peer­ing through his mi­cro­sco­pe at samp­les from his den­tal plaque or Delft ca­nal wa­ters and nam­ing the crea­tur­es he ob­serv­ed "ani­mal­cul­es." How­ever, that sto­ry is apo­cryph­al be­cause Leeu­wen­hoek spoke Dutch. The words he used to de­scribe Read more →

Pictures Considered #53 : The ocean water column is profoundly dark...

by Christoph | ...for the most part. And it's vastly deep­er than the dia­gram Ro­ber­to showed in his re­cent post "The Bio­lo­gi­cal Pump." The eu­photic and meso­pe­lagic zone sizes are cor­rect, but do not even ap­pro­xi­ma­te­ly co­re­late with their ver­ti­cal re­pre­sen­ta­tion in the dia­gram. Why is this a point... Read more →

Teachers Corner: Chalks Talks vs PowerPoints

by Elio | Two years ago today, Christopher Waters from Michigan State University posted a preprint in bioRxiv entitled "Rock the Chalk: A five-year comparative analysis of a large microbiology lecture course reveals improved outcomes of chalk-talk compared to PowerPoint." It is a good read... Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: The Biological Pump

by Roberto | Quick, without much think­ing, what image came to mind when you read "bio­lo­gi­cal pump" in to­day's title? If you are like me, pre­dis­posed to think in cel­lu­lar and mo­le­cu­lar terms, you might have thought of an in­te­gral mem­brane pro­tein that pumps mo­le­cules in­to or out the cell. Per­haps any of... Read more →

Pictures Considered #52 : Streptomyces stacks Z-rings...

by Christoph | Streptomyces stacks Z-rings... into lad­ders in­side its aeri­al/spo­ro­gen­ic hy­phae. If this sen­tence strikes you as a bar­rage of jar­gon or just gib­ber­ish, don't des­pair, help is coming. First, en­joy the "light show" in the 20‑se­cond video clip on the right side. It runs in loop, so you can fol­low more than... Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: Alpha, Beta, Gamma Diversities

by Elio
In ecology, these terms refer to various le­vels of species diversities... Read more →

Antibiotics and the Foods We Eat

by Roberto | When it comes to the ani­mals that hu­mans raise to eat, a quick look at their num­bers proves sober­ing. World­wide, there are some 650 mill­ion pigs, 1 bill­ion heads of cattle and 26 bill­ion chickens. Such numbers ca­not be achieved by tra­di­tio­nal ani­mal rear­ing pract­ices that use ex­ten­sive surface areas. Rather, most of these ani­mals are grown... Read more →

Of Terms in Biology: Sympatry and Allopatry

by Elio | Sympatry means that two species coexist in the same physical area, allopatry that they don't. The etymology of the suffix patris, helps. It comes from the Latin for 'fatherland,' as in 'patriot' (or, for those who remember the Marseillaise, "Alons enfants de la Patrie"). Read more →

Retrospective, June to December 2020

by Elio
Here is a list of our posts from the last half year − which felt significantly longer than usual, right? − briefly annotated... Read more →

A Whiff of Taxonomy – the genus Psychrobacter

by Christoph | What could be more chill­ing than to de­viate for once from our mot­to to "...em­pha­size the un­usual and the un­ex­pected phe­no­mena" and ta­king a look at a, well, slightly bor­ing group of psy­chro­phil­ic bac­te­ria? The ge­nus Psy­chro­bac­ter − the pre­fix psychro- comes from the an­cient Greek ψυχρός for cold, frozen − con­tains about 40 de­scribed spe­cies of... Read more →