Displaying posts tagged with

“extremophiles”

A new life form? Not so fast

So everybody is excited about the new GFAJ-1 bacterium that Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues have discovered. A common buzzphrase diffusing through the media and blogosphere is “NASA discovers a new  life form“. (Or, better yet alien life.) Big press conference, and I just finished going through  the article that Wolfe-Simon and colleagues have published in Science. Great […]

Baby it’s cold outside

Most of the Earth’s surface is colder than the inside of your refrigerator. Deep sea temperatures are almost universally 2-4C. That’s already 73%  of the Earth’s surface. Then add to that the  polar regions, mountain ranges and permafrost and you have about 85% of the Earth’s surface constantly at refrigerator or freezer temperatures. While there […]

On Microbial Sequencing

This is the 9th year the NSF & USDA  hold  a workshop for their microbial sequencing program awardees. (Full disclosure: I am not one of them).  Most of the talks are by the awardees themselves, and there were some great talks. For me an interesting angle was it to see how software is being developed […]