MicrobeWorld

On Jan. 6, 2009, in Arlington, Virginia, the National Science Foundation, The Ballston Science and Technology Alliance, and BioInformatics, LLC, hosted a Cafe Scientifique on Science and Social Media. In part 2 of this 4 part video, Chris Condayan, Manager of Public Outreach for the American ... Read More

This is a postercast by Jeffrey C. Kwong, scientist at ICES. Read More

Here's a nice edu resource-related video about the biology of bacteria that the team over at SciVee.tv posted. It looks like it originally came from Maryland Public Television. This is probably good for many intro to microbiology type courses and high school level life science classes. Read More

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The UK's National Center for Biology Eduction has an interesting experiment involving toilet paper, hot water and oyster mushroom starter culture.

"Gastronomes will no doubt be aware of the presence of an increasing range of exotic mushrooms on the supermarket shelves. In the Far East, oyster... Read More

Here's a nice demonstration video by Dr. Conor O'Bryne from the Dept. of Microbiology at National University of Ireland, Galway, showing how to perform a serial dilution on a liquid food sample (in this case raw unpasteurised milk). The raw milk sample is diluted down to 1/1000 in a sterile dil... Read More

The May Issue of Agricultural Research published by the USDA-ARS contains several stories about microbes involved in everything from anthrax to zoonoses—diseases that can spread from animals to people.

One story that I found interesting is on the research being done to faster identify and de... Read More

Over half of all new diseases in humans since 1940 have jumped from animals to humans and researchers predict that the bulk of new and emerging diseases in humans over the next century will come from domestic animals and wildlife.  Anthropozoonoses... Read More

What is metabolomics? Oh, that's easy. It's the study of the metabolome. Very good. Now, what is the metabolome?

* the collection of all metabolites in a biological organism, which are the end products of its gene expression. (Source)
* the complete set of small-molecule metabolites ... Read More

This poster, presented at the 109th ASM general meeting demonstrates the relationship between clinical measures of cystic fibrosis, a common and serious genetic disease, with the microbial ecology of bacteria that colonise the airways of these patients. The technique used to characterise the mi... Read More

In 2007, as the world worried about a possible avian flu epidemic, Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague," gave this powerful TED talk to a University audience. Her insights from past pandemics are may be more relevant than ever today as we strive to understand the potential threat from s... Read More

Melanie Cushion holds down two jobs: she’s a research career scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she’s also professor and associate chair for re... Read More

DNA synthesis technology, in combination with other rapidly-evolving capabilities in the life sciences, such as directed molecular evolution and viral reverse genetics, has galvanized segments of the scientific community.1 It also has captured the attention of the general public and policymaker... Read More

The authors analyze the influenza outbreak in Mexico, and make an early assessment of transmissibility and severity. Read More

In resource-limited countries, a lack of training, proper reagents, supplies, and equipment has impacted their laboratories' ability to identify key pathogenic bacteria and detection of antimicrobial resistance. This has led to an environment of syndromic diagnosis by clinicians who have little ... Read More

The title pretty much sums up the main thrust of the post, which also includes section on cheap, rapid diagnostic tests that not only can identify known pathogens, but provide quite a bit of information about novel pathogens (link to a great Pop!Tech video lecture by Ian LIpkin). There's also a ... Read More

Wow, the NEJM is really knocking out some great "perspectives" in their most recent issue.

The Internet has become a critical medium for clinicians, public health practitioners, and laypeople seeking health information. Data about diseases and outbreaks are disseminated not only through onli... Read More

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This 2000 paper, published in Chest, shows that chicken soup is capable of inhibiting neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro, thus providing some evidence for the soup's traditional role as a home cure for respiratory infections.

Helpfully, the soup recipe used in the study is also included. And it ... Read More

A recent paper published on Biomedcenteral by Jonathan E Allen , Shea N Gardner , Elizabeth A Vitalis, and Tom R Slezak discovers that new genetic markers for human host-specificity and high lethality in influenza viruses were identified by considering combinations of amino acids conserved amon... Read More