MicrobeWorld

It's easy to forget just how far medicine has progressed. While we may worry about the spread of infectious diseases like avian flu or meningitis today, those pathogens have nothing on fearsome pandemics in the distant past like the Plague of Justinian, which killed over 100 million people from ... Read More

There’s no question that variation in size and shape has conferred selective advantages over the course of evolutionary time. One of the most obvious examples is the long neck and legs of the giraffe, which allow it to snatch foliage that is unreachable by vertically challenged competitors. The ... Read More

A large-scale study of a biomedical intervention that potentially offers novel options for women to protect themselves from HIV infection has, to the surprise of many researchers, failed. But the results say more about the participants’ behavior than the effectiveness of the products being teste... Read More

Two studies of malnourished children offer the first major new scientific findings in a decade about the causes and treatment of severe malnutrition, which affects more than 20 million children around the world and contributes to the deaths of more than a million a year. Merely giving children a... Read More

UCLA infectious disease expert Anne Rimoin talks about the alarming recent rise in monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Read More

BBC medical correspondent Fergus Walsh explains how British scientists have used a new technique to develop a synthetic virus which heralds a major development in vaccines.

Click "source" to view video. Read More

A synthetic version of the Schmallenberg virus has been made in the laboratory by Scottish scientists. The research raises hopes for developing a vaccine for the livestock disease, which causes lambs and calves to be stillborn. Schmallenberg virus (SBV) was discovered little more than a year ago... Read More

A joint team of scientists have identified and determined how a tropical rainforest microbe is able to endure high concentrations of an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass. Their discovery may provide a basis for engineering ionic liquid tolerance into strains of fuel-producing micr... Read More

A new federal report blames a combination of problems for a mysterious and dramatic disappearance of U.S. honeybees since 2006.

The intertwined factors cited include a parasitic mite, multiple viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, genetics, habitat loss and pesticides.

The multiple causes mak... Read More

In its native state, according to the CDC, the H5N1 flu virus is highly contagious and is especially deadly to birds. Fortunately, few people have contracted this strain of flu as it's quite deadly in people as well. Luckily, there have been very few cases of transmission of the virus between pe... Read More

It's a chemical that's been in U.S. households for more than 40 years, from the body wash in your bathroom shower to the knives on your kitchen counter to the bedding in your baby's basinet.

But federal health regulators are just now deciding whether triclosan — the germ-killing ingredient fo... Read More

Efavirenz (tradenames: Sustiva, Stocrin) is an antiretroviral (ARV) drug commonly used to treat HIV. Its popularity as a medication, alone or more commonly in combination with other HIV medications (tradename: Atripla), is due to its superior effectiveness in suppressing replication of the virus... Read More

Pili are hair like appendages that are found on the outer membrane of bacteria. They are important for bacteria to attach to solid surfaces, are used as an apparatus in transfer of DNA from one cell to another, as well as twitching motility, and cell-cell adhesion.
In 2011 a group of scientist ... Read More

Bacteria, viruses and parasites from land animals such as cats, cows and humans are sickening and killing sea mammals. Scientists have been finding a daunting number of land-based pathogens in seals, dolphins, sharks and other ocean dwellers that wash ashore dead or dying, according to an articl... Read More

Glowing bacteria inside squids use light and chemical signals to control circadian-like rhythms in the animals, according to a study to be published on April 2 in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, houses... Read More

Seeing the mosquito-transmitted chikungunya virus pathogen at very high resolution while it’s bound to antibodies could lead to vaccines for the disease. The infection causes symptoms similar to dengue fever, followed by a prolonged disease that affects the joints and causes severe arthritis. In... Read More

As the lakefront officially opens to swimmers Friday, the Lake Michigan shoreline joins the cutting edge in the war on bacteria after decades of using day-old water samples to decide whether to close beaches.

In Chicago, the Park District will use a new high-tech system that uses computer sof... Read More

Biology and nanotechnology are moving ever closer together. Ars recently wrote about the use of nanoparticles to aid delivery of stem cells in cardiac therapy. Now, Swiss researchers have developed nanoparticles that can detect, and one day could combat, viruses.

When viruses enter the human ... Read More

Researchers have uncovered details of a mechanism that bacteria use to avoid the effects of antibiotics, which could pave the way for developing new drugs to counteract antibiotic resistance.

The discovery, from researchers at Durham University and the University of Birmingham, gives the firs... Read More

Five people in Saudi Arabia have died from a Sars-like virus and two more are seriously ill, officials say. The seven cases were all from al-Ahsa governorate in the east of the country, the Saudi news agency SPA said citing health officials. The novel coronavirus (NCoV) causes pneumonia and some... Read More