Last week I went to an interesting event hosted by Northeastern’s College of Engineering that opened my eyes a little wider to the problem of biofilms. These are colonies of bacterial cells that stick to all kinds of surfaces–from the bones in your spinal cord to paper towels in a trash can. It wasn’t until the ...
Persistence — it’s what keeps us all surviving. If it weren’t for this lovely quality, we’d just give up and crawl under a rock somewhere because it’s all just so darn difficult out there in the world. Same’s true for every bacterial infection we know of, the chronic ones in particular. Persistence is paramount. Think ...
Of the three ways we can dry our hands after scrubbing down, the paper towel method tends to be the most hygienic. When I asked chemical engineering professor and chair Tom Webster how this could possibly be, he told me that air dryers can actually blow bacteria onto other surfaces, causing further contamination down the ...
This afternoon, reading through Professor Kim Lewis’ soon to be published article in Cell Press (available ahead of print here), I may have fancied myself something of a private investigator with the high stakes job of providing a comprehensive picture of his new findings for you, my dedicated reader. It was a pretty action-heavy couple ...
Ed Yong might be my favorite blogger. He’s certainly the most prolific one I’m aware of (don’t sign up for his twitter feed if you don’t want to be inundated all day long — how do people keep up with that sort of thing?!). But more importantly he’s entertaining and good at what he does. ...