The more we look, the more we realise just how important intact ecosystems are for our own well-being - and it really doesn’t matter at which scale we are looking. When Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian…
Antibiotics joined our growing arsenal of weapons in the fight against disease over seventy years ago. Their target – the bacterial infections that putrefied our wounds, filled our lungs with pneumonia…
Food poisoning doesn’t just come from dodgy kebabs, under-cooked chicken and restaurants with poor hygiene practices – it can also occur in the home. And anyone who has suffered a bout of food poisoning…
As a food microbiologist, I have always been amazed at people’s belief in the three- or five-second rule. It goes something like this: if you retrieve food dropped on the floor or another surface within…
After the big wet, spare a thought for the health of your waterways and the substances that wash into them. Bacteria are important to the health of the waterways running through our backyards. As decomposers…
When you read the word “bacteria” you probably think about illness, advertisements for “probiotic” food supplements, and maybe about brushing your teeth. Chances are, you probably don’t think about electricity…
Could contemporary plague outbreaks such as those that have hit Peru and the USA have their origins in the medieval era? It would seem so. A paper published in Nature today reports a genome sequence taken…