This post is part of the Meet a Microbe series on the blog. Check it out to meet other microbes! The vineyard becomes the lab in investigations of Botrytis cinerea. It’s a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” type of fungus because it causes two very different types of infections. It produces sweet wine grapes during noble rot…
I probably spend way too much time on Twitter browsing the latest science news and getting distracted by all the cool things in the microbial world. Yes, Science Twitter is a great place to find relevant research papers. Here’s a few things that caught my eye this month.
In 2008, National Public Radio’s Science Friday searched the scientific literature to find answers to an important holiday question: does the alcohol in eggnog kill Salmonella? When the team couldn’t find the answers in the literature, they instead found a lab that routinely makes eggnog each year.
If you’re a microbiologist, there’s nothing quite as infuriating as contaminants growing on an agar plate, crowding out growth of your intended microbes. But this often frustrating aspect of microbiology research, turned into something quite the contrary when Greg McCallum, a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham, posted a photo of a colleague’s contaminated…
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has been largely untouched by humans since the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in 1986. Now over 30 years later, there’s been an abundance of wildlife in the 1,600 square mile zone despite their exposure to radioactive material in the soil and food. Scientists are monitoring animal populations with camera traps set up…