Holiday soaps

Can't think of a better soap to have around than this

http://www.etsy.com/shop/CleanerScience

Time for the beach?

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/07/dirtiest-beaches-nrdc

It doesn't matter how expansive the ocean is, the beaches aren't always pristine!

I was happy to see that the NC beaches were generally on the "cleaner" end. This was based on coliform bacteria present. Interesting factoid - beaches that meet minimum federal standards would still sicken 1 in 28 swimmers. Not sure how that was calculated but impressive if true.

South Padre Island in Texas was also listed as one of the cleanest - nice to hear given how many students flock down there each Spring

the titantic's second demise - bacteria

http://www.microbeworld.org/index.php?option=com_jlibrary&view=article&id=8629&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter

appropriate timing of this story coinciding with 3D release of the movie!

living in the deep ocean, chomping on iron, not a typical way to make a living but someone's got to do it....

Cleaning/restoring paintings with bacteria

First saw this in National Geographic - another neat application of microbes to treat delicate art pieces where traditional cleaning methods might be damaging

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110607063411.htm

Earth Microbiome project (EMP)

there are a group of scientists that are trying to use 16s and metagenomic analysis across all of Earth's ecosystems. The goal is an incredible number of environmental samples (10K-200K depending on the source of the info) expected to generate 15 trillion base pairs of DNA sequence information.

http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/

This is an incredible project that should yield some pretty fantastic insights into microbial life on this planet

For current students: The importance of this project relates back to the fact that so many (an estimated 99%) of the bacteria out there are not easily cultured by our standard techniques, therefore we seldom detect that they are there and in many instance, we have never detected them. By analyzing the DNA we can detect their presence and estimate their diversity by comparing the DNA to microbes that we have already worked with. Expect this project to reveal many new lineages of bacterial life!

Looking for treasure trove of ancient microbes

Lake Vostok is a giant freshwater lake that is entombed beneath 2 miles of ice. It is estimated that this body of water has been sealed off for ~10 million years. Scientists have been drilling for a long time in hopes of reaching the water and to then be able to sample it.

What would they expect to find? Microbes would be the primary form. What would microbes that hadn't intermingled with other microbes in millions of years look like? That's the magic question. My guess is that there will be some really amazing things that come from this and that it will related to environmental metagenomic analysis

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/world/europe/russian-scientists-bore-into-ancient-antarctic-lake.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/lake-vostok-microbes-unlikely-life_n_1264605.html (this article diverges quickly but for current students I like how it alludes to the extremophiles)

An interesting side note - the world's coldest recorded temperature was at Vostok - minus 128.6 degrees. They had to try to do most of this work in the "summer" when flight into the site was possible

Healthmap getting more use with official groups

Healthmap is one of those resources I've been showing students in class for the past year or two. Here's a nice quick note from Nature Medicine that supports that it's getting more use by official health-related units.

The internet brings massive amounts of data combined with up-to-the-minute changes and flexibility. By culling through this data and tying in geographic mapping, there are some really creative projects that are changing the way we track and predict disease spread.

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v18/n2/full/nm0212-185.html?WT.ec_id=NM-201202