Innovation and a dollop of creativity has allowed researchers to make laboratory luxuries a reality in the field. Nowadays, you can do almost anything even in the most remote of areas. For example, the ability to sequence DNA in the field will be possible in the not so distant future. That said, many projects are …
A terrifying, yet not surprising article was published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases about mcr-1. For those who aren’t familiar with it, mcr-1 is a gene associated with antibiotic resistance to colistin, a type of polymyxin antibiotic used to treat infections that are already resistant to several other types of antibiotics. News sources have …
California may be in drought, but the ideas keep flowing about different ways to conserve water in green buildings. Only recently have scientists began to truly understand how these obvious benefits to the environment may be adversely affecting human health. In a paper published in Environmental Science Water Research & Technology, researchers have aimed to …
I had the pleasure of meeting with Philip Hugenholtz at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University of Queensland last week. Even the architecture of the centre is designed after phylogenetic trees! Of the many projects going on amongst the team of about 35 there, is the extensive effort in fixing the genome tree …
It is well known that antibiotic resistance in bacteria happens much faster than we can possibly develop novel antibiotics. So what if instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we just rearrange it? Well, researchers at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute had a similar idea in regards to reducing antibiotic resistance …
A few weeks ago, I came across this article that someone had posted to social media with the title “Your make-up could KILL you: Deadly meningitis bacteria discovered in products”. It turns out there are a lot of articles on the internet discussing the horrors of expired makeup, the most recent ones linking back to a …
I was clicking around news stories and found this Huffington Post article called “How Much Bacteria is In Your Burger?” Here’s what they report: “…every sample of ground beef collected by researchers from supermarkets around the country contained enterococcus and/or nontoxin-producing E. coli, which indicate fecal contamination. In other words, all the beef had poop …
What’s that cool structure in that UC Davis research field? It’s an egg mobile! Egg mobiles are exactly what they sound like — a mobile chicken coop that can be towed to a different location, such as a different area of a pasture. There are nestboxes and roosts inside for the egg-laying chickens; they also have …
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is finally cracking down on products that tap into the neurotic tendencies of extreme germophobes. In this recent Consumerist article, Chris Morran discusses the penalties Zadro Health Solutions and Angel Sales had to pay for false advertising of their disinfection products. Without a single lab experiment, we can already deduce …
As many of you know, parts of Yosemite national Park closed this passed week because of several cases of the plague. For most, the plague comes with the stigma of being an extremely deadly disease. But for others, the plague spells out a quite fascinating story of infectious disease. Secretions by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis …