MicrobeWorld

Bruce Walker, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, talks about his article in the July issue of Scientific American magazine called Controlling HIV, about rare individuals who never develop AIDS af... Read More

In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: The ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestib... Read More

Buried under the seafloor for 86 million years, a bacterial community lives so slowly it's still surviving on a "lunch box" from dinosaur days, a new study says. (See marine-microbe pictures.)

It's been known since the 1990s that microbes can live trapped in ocean sediments for millions of ye... Read More

A spice used in curry dishes helps to prevent infection and now scientists think they've got a lead on how.

Curcumin is a compound found in turmeric, a flavourful, orange and yellow spice that is a key ingredient in South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. The spice has also been used in India... Read More

Although the vast majority of sinus infections are caused by viruses, bacteria are likely to be the culprits in specific circumstances, and in those instances, antibiotics should be used.


This information comes from a new guideline issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) ... Read More

Giving the flu vaccine to pregnant women may bring significant benefits to their babies even before birth, a new study has found.

Canadian researchers studied the records of 55,570 mothers of singletons, of whom 23,340 were vaccinated during pregnancy from November 2009 through April 2010. Co... Read More

I was in New York on 11 September 2001, standing near one of the TV screens in the media section of Unicef's communication division, where I headed up Unicef's global communication work on immunisation. As the second plane crashed into the twin towers, we were quickly evacuated out of Unicef hea... Read More

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Sarah Connolly, Andrew Karaba, Read More

Ed writes:

Vincent, Dick, Rich, Alan et al.,

A couple more visual science-type picks for you to follow on from Kathy Spindler’s pick – APoD

The stunning new Pursuit of Light video from NASA:  Read More

E Pluribus Unum, the de facto motto of the United States, could just as well apply to biofilm-forming bacteria. Bacterial biofilms are far more resistant than individual bacteria to the armories of antibiotics we have devised to combat them. Now Tim Holm Jakobsen and Michael Givskov of the Univ... 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

In multicellular organisms it is essential that every cell behaves and does the job it was produced to perform. The survival of a multicellular organism depends on this - every cell in your body is tightly controlled in terms of how big it can grow (fairly big), when it can reproduce (almost ne... Read More

Most people are fascinated by the colorful and exotic coral reefs, which form habitats with probably the largest biodiversity. But human civilisation is the top danger to these fragile ecosystems through climate change, oxygen depletion and ocean acidification. Industrialisation, deforestation a... Read More

The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is proud to announce the 2012 award laureates. The awards will be presented during the 112th General Meeting of the ASM, June 16-19, 2012 in San Francisco, CA.

Abbott Award in Clinical and Diagnostic Immunology honors a distinguished scientist in th... Read More

This episode: Discovery of a bacterium infected by two distinct organisms at the same time!

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It wasn't so long ago that antibacterial products, from soaps to hand gels to wipes for your kitchen counter, became ubiquitous in our grocery stores and our daily lives. Not long afterwards, though, we started hearing reports that these products and their even more powerful cousins, antibiotic ... Read More

A new study of Greek patients shows that overgrowth of bacteria in the gut is definitively linked to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It is the first to use the "gold standard" method of examining gut bacterial cultures to connect bacteria to the cause of a disease that affects some 30 million Am... Read More

Drinking a daily glass of red wine not only tastes good to many people, but it's also good for the bacteria lining your large intestine.

A new Spanish study suggests that sipping about 9 ounces of Merlot or a low-alcohol red wine changed the mix of good and bad bacteria typically found in th... Read More

Federal land managers have rejected an application by a Colorado company to use bacteria to produce methane from northeast Wyoming coal beds.

Luca Technologies Inc. wants to use a process called methane farming in which water and chemicals are injected into a coal seam, activating microbes th... Read More

Scientists from the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Bonn have succeeded for the first time in the real time filming of the transport of an important information carrier in biological cells that is practically unmodified. This paper has now been published in ... Read More