Let’s get this clear: Tyrannosaurus rex, the best selling figurine of class reptilia is not my favorite bad-ass top-of-the-food chain predator. Come on. Did you see its arms? I mean… As a kid, I always thought the Allosaurus was much cooler. For one thing, it was on the cover of my favorite dinosaur book, “The […]
I am finishing up a great weekend at HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus. The occasion is an annual symposium celebrating the Phage genomics Course taking place in dozens of universities in the USA. Here are two of our students, Erich Goebel and Morgan Light, next to the poster they presented at the meeting: This post […]
I am fascinated with zombies. Always have been, but even more so since I took an interest in microbiology. The zombie apocalypse is the best known and best chronicled viral infection which hasn’t happened. But it could happen any day, so stock up on non-perishable food, medical supplies, water purification tablets, chainsaws, machetes, baseball […]
Fine, I get it. “Prokaryotes” is a wrong taxonomic term. It’s wrong to lump bacteria and archaea together. That would be like saying “eutoichic” to lump all bacteria, archaea, plants and fungi together because they have cell walls. (“τοίχος” =wall in Greek. My Google Translate-foo is STRONG!) Still, there are so many things in common among […]
Yes, it’s that time when we all get together in front of the screen to watch another beautiful game played by that fantastic team contributing to the Carnival of Evolution. This time hosted on the lovely green pitch of Byte Size Biology. So get your popcorn, sunflower-seeds, crisps or any other culturally-appropriate sports-watching food and…… […]
Seems like I had a couple of taxonomic posts recently. So BsB would like to know what is your favorite Kingdom of life. I used the 6 kingdom system just to make things slightly more interesting. Vote in the pollbox on the righthand sidebar. You only have yourself to blame if your favorite kingdom is […]
Despite our best attempts to remove species from the face of the Earth, there is still quite a bit of life out there and it is still quite diverse. Also, there are still quite a few people who want to document, describe and make the rest of us aware of the magnitude and diversity of […]
