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 ...
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 ...
“Living in panama and working on the reefs I would watch white band disease sweep through the population,” said assistant professor of earth and environmental science Steve Vollmer. He pursued post-doctoral research at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Islan. The disease he’s talking about is one of 22 that affect coral reefs. ...
Sepsis is a whole-body inflammatory response to an overwhelming infection by bacteria or other microogransim. At first glance, it may not seem like a big enough issue to dedicate a whole day toward. But consider the following and then decide: Every 3-4 seconds, someone dies of sepsis. 70% of all infant deaths worldwide are due ...
In the last fifty years, pharmaceutical companies have spent tens of billions of dollars trying to find new classes of antibiotic drugs. Only one has made it into clinical practice. Seem surprising to you? Yeah, me too. At the same time, antibacterial resistance has been rising, meaning the pathogens that infect us are getting better ...
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. ...
There are approximately 5 nonillion bacteria on earth (where a million has six zeros after the one, a nonillion has 30 zeroes). The microorganisms that live in the environment and in animal “microbiomes” (the collection of all the bacteria that call an animal home) represent the most diverse group of species around. They can be ...
Anthony D’Onofrio studies dirt…or the bacteria that grow on dirt, to be more specific. He is a post-doctoral researcher in the Antimicrobial Discovery Center led by Professor Kim Lewis in the biology department and has started a non-profit educational organization, along with Professor Lewis, called Sample America to help him with a somewhat impossible task: ...