Comes news that could lead someone to adapt Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film “The Birds” and take it in a different direction—a direction that’s both scary and scatalogical. Maryn McKenna, the science journalist widely known as Scary Disease Girl, tweeted this alert: Seagulls: threat or menace? They’re pooping resistant bacteria on your favorite beach. She gives […]
Tag: bacteria
Panda poo research: Building on the Ig-winning work?
Newly announced American research on panda feces seems to echo the research (this and this) that garnered the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in biology for Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guangle [see photo below of Prof. Taguchi accepting the Ig Nobel Prize; photo by Alexey Eliseev]. The news reports we’ve seen don’t say whether the new […]
Bacteria and you (a healthy rant)
Mike the Mad Biologist writes, in his blog: During the last week, I’ve come across a couple sensationalist article about E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus being found on common surfaces. Here’s one article about shopping carts and E. coli… And here’s an article about Staphylococcus aureus (those S. aureus resistant to methicillin–and often other antibiotics–are […]
Herring + whales + bacteria =
When different species meet, interesting things can happen. Here’s a case in point: “Digestion of herring by indigenous bacteria in the minke whale forestomach,” Monica A. Olsen, Tove H. Aagnes and Svein D. Mathiesen, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, December 1994, p. 4445-4455. The authors, at the University of Tromso, Norway, report: “Northeastern Atlantic minke whales […]