Home

On:

Can you catch the flu from your restaurant plate? It’s an important question: There are 20 million cases of acute gastroenteritis and 128,000 hospitalizations a year that are attributed to food-borne illness. Food expert Melvin Pascall says, "While there are dishware cleaning guidelines, there are no actual laws that mandate food service businesses must use them. We know that when public food establishments follow the cleaning protocols, they do a very good job at getting rid of bacteria, but we don’t know if those protocols work to kill viruses–and this may help explain why there are still so many illnesses caused by contaminated food."
read more

On:

A study of hailstones has found large numbers of bacteria at their cores. It turns out that the bacteria help create the snow and hail, since their coating of protein causes water to freeze at relatively warm temperatures. In fact, bacteria works so well that it’s used in snow-making machines.
read more

On:

While we desperately wage war against bacteria by developing new varieties of antibiotics, there’s at least SOME good news: some types of bacteria wage a kind of "civil war" against EACH OTHER. There are predators in the bacterial world that consume other bacteria, much as predators attack prey in the animal world. Some of these predator microbes might be put to work against disease-causing bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics. Biologist Daniel Kadouri says that his team focused on two bacteria that were chosen because they are true predators. He says, "They actually have to consume other bacteria in order to complete their life cycles. They have a great ability to seek out other bacteria, invade them, grow in or on them, and kill them."
read more

On:

Scientists are melting ice from a lake in Antarctica that has been frozen for a million years, in order to study the microbes trapped within it. Are they releasing something that could be dangerous?

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica, in order to examine the eons-old water for microorganisms. They want to try to figure out how these tiny, living “time capsules” survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold and without food and energy from the sun.
read more