Almost immediately after the fearful news about elevator buttons, and with the world worried about the Ebola virus, the American Society for Microbiology has issued a press release decrying the dangers of doorknobs. As I wrote here recently, three doctors in Toronto wrote a little study about the bacteria they found on hospital elevator buttons. That study might foster a renewed yearning […]
Tag: microbes
Neviadomsky discovers every germ at once!
The New York Medical Journal‘s “Pith of Current Literature” section contained summaries of the most important findings in other journals. Most importantly, it summarized foreign-language articles – since nobody was translating entire issues of Riforma Medica or Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie, this was unique information. In the October 1, 1904 issue we learned about the findings of […]
So you like big numbers…
If you enjoy thinking about big numbers, track down a copy of this article, and have yourself a merry time: “Beyond the infinite – tracking bacterial gene expression,” Jack A. Gilbert [pictured here], Microbiology Today. vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 82-86. May 2010. “IF THE NUMBER of known stars in the Milky Way is multiplied by the […]
Cool way to begin a science story (jeans)
The Surprising Science blog gave a mighty cool beginning to this report: The Myth of the Frozen Jeans Levi Strauss advises freezing your jeans to kill the germs that make them smelly, thereby saving the water you’d use in washing them. Don’t bother, says Stephen Craig Cary, a University of Delaware expert on frozen microbes, who wrote to us from Antarctica….