Microbiology

The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet…

Science is always looking for new ways to protect plants and the environment. In Hawaii, for example, when their staple papaya was under attack by aphids that transferred the "papaya ringspot virus"…

Soybeans greatly benefit from nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which reduces the need for fertilizer, and a new study shows that gene-edited bacteria can supply the equivalent of 35 pounds of nitrogen from…

When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to…

Two cases of Yersinia pestis in human remains found in a mass burial in Charterhouse Warren in Somerset and one in a ring cairn monument in Levens in Cumbria show that the Plague may have erupted a…

If you’re a gardener, you may use peat moss - decomposed Sphagnum moss - in soil because it helps retain moisture.  Peatlands, wetlands characterized by a thick layer of water-saturated, carbon…

Two years before SARS-CoV-2, the Alongshan (ALS) virus emerged in China. It was alarming because it was found to be a member of the flavivirus family along with the devastating tickborne encephalitis…

Whole Foods and other high-priced alternatives like Farmer's Markets sell imagery of pretty, thin people carrying bountiful produce, but the icky reality is that, unless it is canned or frozen, most…

The omicron subvariant known as BA.5 was first detected in South Africa in February 2022 and spread rapidly throughout the world. As of the second week of July 2022, BA.5 constituted nearly 80% of…

Eukaryogenesis is the point at which animal and plant cells separate from bacteria. In animal and plant cells, tubulin forms microtubules which are critical to their internal organization, because…