MicrobeWorld

Walter Cronkite reviews the history of Yellowstone National Park, discusses the microbe that led to the Polymerase Chain Reaction technique used for fingerprinting DNA, and parallels Costa Rica to Yellowstone's hot springs as areas of important, but still largely unexplored, biodiversity. The... Read More

Walter Cronkite describes the wonders of Yellowstone National Park, including the park's microbial world and how the extreme environment of the park's hot springs may serve as a model for the possibility life on other planets. The video podcast of Yellowstone Revealed is presented by the Amer... Read More

Explore the future of microbes and how they can improve the quality of life on Earth through genetic engineering, bioremediation and electronics.

As antibiotics lose their ability to control infectious diseases, scientists are busy looking for new, more effective drugs from the soil of a park in Vancouver to the radioactive environment of Chernobyl.

{flvremote}http://mwvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/IntimateStrangers/Episode_9_-_Resist... Read More

In underdeveloped countries, poor conditions increase the risk of disease and scarce medical resources make harder to treat disease properly. Witness how a strain of Hanta virus in Argentina evolves to pass between humans without an intermediate host.

{flvremote}http://mwvideo.s3.amaz... Read More

A look at the common food pathogen called Salmonella and how it spreads. And the hunt for the cause of English Sweating Sickness that once ravaged the English countryside in the 15th and 16th centuries.

{flvremote}http://mwvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/IntimateStrangers/Episode_7_-_A_Friendl... Read More

Dr. Stuart Levy and Dr. Fred Koster track a mystery killer from a Navajo community in New Mexico with help from Dr. C.J. Peters with the Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. Steven Giovannoni finds microbes in the most unusual places in the ocean and attempts to grow a mystery microbe in the lab.

Dr. Dan Janzen and Dr. Ignacio Chapela catalog both the larger and microbial life forms inside a single ecosystem in Costa Rica, finding that neither plants, animals, nor microbes would be able to exist without the others.

{flvremote}http://mwvideo.s3.amazonaws.com/IntimateStrangers/E... Read More

Dr. Karen Nelson and Dr. Craig Venter map the genome of Thermatoga, the microbes Dr. Karl Stetter discovered in Episode 1 of this podcast, and find convincing evidence that Thermatoga's origins are very close to the beginning of life on Earth.

{flvremote}http://mwvideo.s3.amazonaws.co... Read More

A new understanding of life on Earth has forced us to redraw the tree of life. Dr. Carl Woese and Norman Pace describe the process and challenges of categorizing microbial life.

Join Dr. Karl Stetter on a mission to find the closest living relative of the first life on Earth as he discovers a strain of bacteria he names "Thermatoga."

Microbes on Primetime

In November 1999, millions of television viewers tuned in to the national PBS broadcast premiere of Intimate Strangers: Unseen Life on Earth, the first ever prime-time program to ... Read More