MicrobeWorld

The Polio Wall of Fame is a set of fifteen sculptured busts of 17 individuals who made important contributions to understanding and preventing poliomyelitis. The busts are mounted on an exterior wall of Founder’s Hall at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Ge... Read More

For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project t... Read More

Young children and the elderly are especially susceptible to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The three-dimensional structure of respiratory syncytial virus has been solved by an international team from Finland and Switzerland.

RSV is a common cause of respiratory infection, but there is no... Read More

An antibiotic has been found to stimulate its own production. The findings, to be published in PNAS, could make it easier to scale up antibiotic production for commercialisation.

Scientists Dr Emma Sherwood and Professor Mervyn Bibb from the John Innes Centre were able to use their discovery ... Read More

A Cornell University study offers further proof that the divergence of humans from chimpanzees some 4 million to 6 million years ago was profoundly influenced by mutations to DNA sequences that play roles in turning genes on and off.

The study, published June 9 in Nature Genetics, provides ev... Read More

Bacteria, for the most part, thrive in extreme temperatures and in arid conditions. But some types of bacteria have the capacity to do this and more: they grow within diverse environments and adapt easily. One such species is the Bacillus subtilis. Known to make its home in soil and in water, re... Read More

Patients in Vietnam and other locations with central nervous system infections may well be suffering from the effects of a newly discovered virus. Researchers have detected a virus they're calling CyCV-VN in spinal fluid from 4% of 642 patients with central nervous system infections of unknown c... Read More

Four more people have died from the MERS virus in Saudi Arabia, bringing the death toll from the SARS-like virus in the kingdom to 32, the health ministry has said.

A statement on the ministry's website said on Monday two people had died in the western city of Taif and the other two were pron... Read More

Pharmaceutical experts NSF DBA have created an interactive guide to hand washing.
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Here's my summary of the third day of ASM2013, wherein I met with neat people and ideas.

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Because of their central importance to biology, proteins have been the focus of intense research, particularly the manner in which they are produced from genetically coded templates -- a process commonly known as translation. While the general mechanism of translation has been understood for som... Read More

The cell fragments play a role in the body’s first line of defense against bacterial infection, helping white blood cells grab blood-borne bacteria in the liver. Platelets may contribute to protection against bacterial infection, according to new research published today (June 16) in Nature Immu... Read More

In a piece of work carried out by the Carbohydrate Metabolism Research Team of the Institute of Agrobiotechnology (a centre jointly owned by the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre, the Spanish National Scientific Research Council-CSIC, and the Government of Navarre), the discovery has been ma... Read More

A mechanism that cells use to group together and move around the body -- called 'chase and run' -- has been described for the first time by scientists at UCL. Published in Nature Cell Biology, the new study focuses on the process that occurs when cancer cells interact with healthy cells in order... Read More

Why was there a sudden drop in the incidence of leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages? To answer this question, biologists and archeologists reconstructed the genomes of medieval strains of the pathogen responsible for the disease, which they exhumed from centuries old human graves. Their result... Read More

We continue our semi-annual ritual and post this quick tour of our blog posts published since December, 2012.

Pictures Considered

Our new section dealing with “pictures that made a difference but may be nearly forgotten by now” seems to be off to a good start. Please send us suggestions of... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Rich Condit Read More

Jessie writes:

Hi Vince and Dick!

Has anyone volunteered to do transcripts for TWIP? I love this show, and I'd love to be able to contribute in some way. Forgive me if transcripts already exist and I'm just not finding them on the website. If no one is already... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dickson Despommier

Vincent and Dickson reveal... Read More

Seeing how the Hepatitis C virus builds ion channels could help researchers find new drugs to fight the disease. Viruses are masters of minimalist design. With only a simple genome and a handful of proteins, a virus can hijack much more sophisticated cells and mimic many of the intra- and inter-... Read More