It’s been five whole years since I started The Microbial Menagerie and I’d like to thank each and every one of you for following along! In the past years, you’ve seen 108 blog posts (exactly 54,755 words) covering the many ways microbes touch our lives. The blog has received 142,000 page views, from 105,000 visitors…
One of my intentions when I started this blog is to show that microbes are everywhere. So what better way to do that than to share some of the ways we encounter microbes just by venturing outside? Taking a walk, or digging up some dirt, for example. Here are four of the many ways to…
For the last two decades, I’ve sat in the middle of the clarinet section of orchestras, oblivious to the possibility of microbes swirling around me amidst the melodies and harmonies that fill the air. I didn’t once think about the potential spread of pathogens from another player’s instrument. That is, not until the COVID-19 pandemic…
Vaccines in the past typically work by using a weakened virus or a purified viral protein from the virus to stimulate our immune response. But, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines we’ve been hearing about work a bit differently. Instead of containing viral protein, the vaccines contain mRNA, which instructs your cells to make the viral protein…
A dog’s nose knows, and it might just know when you’re emitting the scent of infectious disease. With its 300 million scent receptors, the dog’s most recent detective work involves COVID-19. Dogs are identifying COVID-19 cases in airports You might have seen the many news stories about dogs sniffing out COVID-19 at the Helsinki airport…