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Tag: microbiology
May 10, 2012
Alexander Flemming, discoverer of Penicillin, was also an avid microbial artist (as in he painted with microbes)
Really quite amazing if you consider how the medium needs to applied, since it grows (changes) over time.
In addition to working as a scientist, and well before his discovery of antibiotics, Fleming painted. He was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, where he created amateurish watercolors. Less well known is that he also painted in another medium, living organisms. Fleming painted ballerinas, houses, soldiers, mothers feeding children, stick figures fighting and other scenes using bacteria. He produced these paintings by growing microbes with different natural pigments in the places where he wanted different colors. He would fill a petri dish with agar, a gelatin-like substance, and then use a wire lab tool called a loop to inoculate sections of the plate with different species. The paintings were technically very difficult to make. Fleming had to find microbes with different pigments and then time his inoculations such that the different species all matured at the same time. These works existed only as long as it took one species to grow into the others. When that happened, the lines between, say, a hat and a face were blurred; so too were the lines between art and science.
Via smithsonianmag.com.
May 2, 2012
My business card is actually a microscope slide. #geekcool
This is very cool.
To promote their viral marketing efforts, Italian advertising agency Enfants Terribles (aka Ebolaindustries) created these microscope slide business cards. Ebolaindustries employees operate under pseudonyms, but their real names are printed on the slides in 1.6 point type—so small the names can only be read with a microscope.
By Enfant Terribles, via Laughing Squid.
Like this:
April 23, 2012
When you love the smell of colon on your boyfriend. #funny #anatomy
Good for a slide on maybe intestinal flora?
March 29, 2012
Dr. Sara Baker: as interpreted by Kate Beaton #publichealth #funny
Dr. Sara Josephine Baker: look her up. Under her watch the infant mortality rate in New York city went from being one of the worst possible to one of the most enviable, and her ideas on public health and preventative care spread far and wide. She swam against the stream her entire life and she saved thousands of people, what more do you want in a hero?
By Kate Beaton. More on Dr. Baker at wiki.
November 28, 2011
A social media experiment: Can we use twitter to produce an interesting analogy on the subject of viruses?
This may crash and burn, but might also be interesting. Extra coolness, if the tweet mutates somewhere along the line (although it’s also obvious that it would take a lot to reach the necessary “viral load” to see the tweet propagate – maybe instead of a dot, a star would be better?).
Anyway, if it sounds like fun, you can RT by visiting the link of the original tweet.
October 13, 2011
Luke Jerram’s amazing microbial glasswork
By Luke Jerram: go here to see more of this collection. Note, I’ve written about Luke’s work previously in Seed.
October 7, 2011
Crapbook: social networking via the microbial profile found in your feces
Julian Davies, a colleague of mine at UBC, coined the term “crapbook” in a lecture today. He was talking about a site called “My.Microbe” and, well, I had to check it out.
“The non-profit programme MyMicrobes, launched today, is inviting people to have their gut bacteria sequenced for about €1,500 (US$2,100). Acting as both social network and DNA database, the website offers a place for people to share diet tips, stories and gastrointestinal woes with one another. In exchange, researchers hope to gather a wealth of data about the bacteria living in people’s guts.” (From Nature – link)
Kind of wierd, actually. And expensive too!
October 3, 2011
San Diego Waves Glow in the Dark
“When jostled, each organism (warmwater phytoplankton Lingulodinium polyedrum) will give off a flash of blue light created by a chemical reaction within the cell. When billions and billions of cells are jostled — say, by a breaking wave — you get a seriously spectacular flash of light. ~Professor Peter J. Franks of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography”
Via Scuttlefish.
September 23, 2011
Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men.
Barbeito, MS; Mathews, CT; Taylor, LA (1967). “Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men”. Applied microbiology 15 (4): 899–906. PMID 4963447
“An investigation was conducted to evaluate the hypothesis that a bearded man subjects his family and friends to risk of infection if his beard is contaminated by infectious microorganisms while he is working in a microbiological laboratory. Bearded and unbearded men were tested with Serratia marcescens and Bacillus subtilis var. niger.Contact aerosol transmission from a contaminated beard on a mannequin to a suitable host was evaluated with both Newcastle disease virus and Clostridium botulinum toxin, type A. The experiments showed that beards retained microorganisms and toxin despite washing with soap and water. Although washing reduced the amount of virus or toxin,a sufficient amount remained to produce disease upon contact with a suitable host.”
Pdf of first page of article
Link to journal article
Assorted awesome figures below:
September 14, 2011
The microbiology of the five second rule.
“The first test involved E. coli bacteria, ceramic tiles, and gummy bears. It was a simple timed test to see if the gummy bears had picked up any bacteria at all after five seconds. They had. But was the relatively short time they’d been exposed to the bacteria a mitigating factor? What if they’d been on the floor an hour? A second series of tests picked up were the first left off. This one used slices of bread on surfaces contaminated with salmonella. Five seconds of exposure left the bread with between 150 and 8,000 bacteria. A minute left them with about ten times as much. So overall, there is value in snatching a piece of food off the floor as quickly as possible. Still, a minute is twelve times as long as five second, while the food had only picked up ten times the bacteria. Clearly there was a rush of bacteria the moment the food hit the floor.”
From io9.com.
August 17, 2011
Polio: The Graphic Novella
Normally, I don’t feel sorry for viruses (sic?), but this little comic does cry for a little empathy. Plus, it’s pretty funny…
Read the whole thing at the SCQ.
