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.
Salmonella in Your Eggnog? Microbiologists Find Out
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.
Noodlococcus and The Beautiful World of Bacterial Contaminants
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…
Microbial Life in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
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…
The corkscrewing Treponema pallidum
We’ve reach the last day of #14DaysofMicrobiologyPoems. I reached out to the science Twitterverse earlier this month in search of 14 microbes worthy of poems. Here is Poem Fourteen, requested by @MoKrobial.





