You may want to stop reading now. I want to talk about microbes. And to start with, I want to talk about the microbes that inhabit the human body.
Articles with Bacteria
Typical gut bacteria grown in a petri dish • Image by Nicola Fawcett and Christopher Wood (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Staphylococcus bacteria • Image by Scientific Animations (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Quibbling about nature’s design
“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone…” So begins William’s Paley’s “Natural Theology,” first published in Britain in 1802.
E. coli bacteria • Photo by Janice Haney Carr, National Escherichia, Shigella, Vibrio Reference Unit at CDC, USCDCP on Pixnio
Some bacteria sniff their way through life
Bacteria have noses. Well, not noses exactly, but scent-sensitive spots where a nose should be, up front, heading into the wind.
Electron micrograph of a typical dust mite • CSIRO (CC BY 3.0)
A very small world
Ever since I started working on this column my eyelids have been itching, and I’ve been involuntarily scratching at my wrists and the gaps between my fingers. It may be psychologically induced, but I swear that I feel them — the invading hordes, the microscopic monsters, the aliens.
Image by Josef Reischig (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Eons of sex
How could I resist a book with a chapter called “Three Billion Years of Sex?”
Escherichia coli • NIAID (CC BY 2.0)
Sharing my space with E. coli friends
I sing the praises of Escherichia coli, bean-shaped bacterium, inhabitant of the human intestine, best understood (as I shall soon reveal) of all God’s creatures.