MicrobeWorld

This comes from the Bitesize Bio site for molecular biologists. It may serve as a handy resource.

Keeping safe in the lab really only requires one thing: common sense. But if you look at what people are doing in the lab, you might think that that common sense isn’t so common after all.

Her... Read More

Bioremediation of industrial sites and petrochemical spillages often involves finding microbes that can gorge themselves on the toxic chemicals. This leaves behind a non-toxic residue or mineralized material. Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution, researchers in China... Read More

"Picture the lobby atrium of a new, green building, one filled with leafy plants and trees. Now imagine that those trees are growing in waste collected from the building's toilets."

Do you still want to work there?

This is an interesting article in Wired on a living sewage system that filt... Read More

Edward Schecter remembers overhearing the doctors saying he was going to die.

His fever had spiked to 106 degrees. Doctors put him in a bathtub full of ice, then gave him a last-ditch antibiotic whose side effects could have killed him. Before his ordeal was over, he would lose more than 20 ... Read More

A swimming pool can offer relief from summer heat, but swimmers should know what they are jumping into. It could be a soup of nasty parasites.

Reports of gastrointestinal illness from use of public pools and water parks have risen sharply in recent years, according to the Centers for Disease ... Read More

"University of Louisville neurologist Robert P. Friedland, M.D., questions the safety of eating farmed fish in the June issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, adding a new worry to concerns about the nation's food supply.

Friedland and his co-authors suggest farmed fish could transmit ... Read More

"Rock snot," a.k.a. Didymosphenia geminata is a fast-spreading single-cell algae that is invading the once pristine streams popular with fly fisherman.

Didymo has a natural tendency to grow upstream in fast-moving rivers and creeks, but it can spread by clinging to fishing equipment, especia... Read More

An article in the NY Times by Dr. Barron H. Lerner from Columbia University Medical Center recounts New York City's response to the 1952 typhoid fever outbreak and how The NYC Public health Department's response helped pave the way for the city's current approach to swine flu influenza H1N1. Cli... Read More

An interdisciplinary team of scientists and researchers at Vanderbilt University has come up with a high-tech approach to combat sepsis, one of the top 10 causes of death in the United States and is responsible for more than half a million people worldwide every year.

The team is made up of c... Read More

This is a really interesting development on the biodiesel from algae front:

Researchers at DOE's Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University have developed groundbreaking “nanofarming” technology that safely harvests oil from the algae so the pond-based “crop” can keep on producing. The so-call... Read More

Researchers at McGill University and the affiliated Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital – along with colleagues at the University of Manitoba and the University of British Columbia – may have found a chink in the armour of the human immunodeficiency vi... Read More

The California Department of Public Health, Food and Drug Branch and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition jointly developed this video in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, university researchers, and industry representati... Read More

New research provides a close-up look at the cone-shaped shell that is the hallmark of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), revealing how it is held together—and possible ways to break it apart.

Previously, scientists had known that the genetic material within HIV is enclosed within a cone-sha... Read More

Florida Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Charles H. Bronson announced today that the department’s Division of Aquaculture has licensed Food Technology Services Incorporated (FTSI) in Mulberry, Florida, to use irradiation to produce safer oyster products. This is the first facility ... Read More

Neisseria meningitidis in sputum. Gram stain (1000X) Read More

A new history book called the The Illustrious Dead on how typhus killed Napoleon's greatest army by Stephen Taltry, a widely published journalist who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Men’s Journal, Time Out New York, Details, and many other publications, is on sale now and get... Read More

A new analysis of the current swine-origin H1N1 influenza A virus suggests that transmission to humans occurred several months before recognition of the existing outbreak.

The work, published online in Nature June 10, highlights the need for systematic surveillance of influenza in swine, and ... Read More

In episode 36 of This Week in Virology, hosts Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, Dick Despommier and guest Hamish You... Read More

Studying the ecology and distribution of plants does not take place solely in the forest. A new way of searching in scientific databases has enabled researchers from the University of Gothenburg to discover kinship between fungi from Sweden and Thailand - and has revealed some species with incor... Read More

Chicken takes the cake as the most common source of food poisoning in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report released today. The report, which analyzed data from 2006's outbreaks of foodborne illnesses in the U.S., found that chicken caused 21 percent of the 27,634 reported ca... Read More