Displaying posts tagged with

“bacteria”

Quit smoking, more bacteria will like you

As an ex-smoker I can attest to this: quitting is  hard.  It can also make you fat. I gained quite a few kilos when I quit, and those took a long time to lose. Happily, these days I am spending money on running marathons rather than on cigarettes. Weight gain after smoking cessation is fairly […]

In defense of ‘prokaryotes’

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 […]

Comparative Functional Genomics: Penguin vs. Bacterium

No, not the flesh-blood-and-feathers penguin, but rather Tux, the beloved mascot of the Linux operating system. Compared with Escherichia coli, the model organism of choice for microbiologists. We refer to DNA as “the book of life”; some geeks refer to it as the “operating system of life”. Just like in a computer’s operating system, DNA […]

A sh*tload of data

There are more microbial cells in our body than our own. Those microbes are not just passive hitchhikers or conversely, malicious agents of disease. They affect our well-being and health in a much broader spectrum than simply “bad” or “passive”. Among other things our gut microbes play an important role in digestion, have been linked […]

WoW is full of bacteria

Speaking of sampling bacteria, this ties in well with the previous post about GEBA. And by “well” I mean “in an alternate-universe/ altered-consciousness manner”. The voices in the song are sampled from this KFC employee training tape. The video won a prize in machinima.com. So if you like World of Warcraft, bacteria, KFC, sampled music, […]