Every minute, a dumptruckful of plastic plops into the world's oceans. That's eight million metric tons every year1. Once waterborne, whatever doesn't wash ashore eventually breaks down into itty bits. The puniest pieces—the ones smaller than 5 millimeters wide—are called microplastics, and their fates are numerous. Some glob onto an Alaska-sized gyre of plastic debris [...]
Want to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Try finding the chemicals that their natural competitors use. Your nose is a battleground. Just like your mouth or gut, it’s full of microbes. But while those other organs are regularly flooded with food, the nose is a wasteland. Resources are scarce there, and competition is fierce, so nasal microbes [...]
Swallowing human faeces will cure disease, the NHS has announces as it opens it first ever frozen faecal bank. Frozen samples are being shipped around the country from a laboratory outside Portsmouth to relieve thousands sufferers of a previously incurable gut problem. Every year in England more than 13,000 people suffer from Clostridium difficile, and one [...]
I dropped a piece of chocolate the other day, and briefly wondered just how many bacteria I had added to my tasty treat. But I saw no dirt, so went ahead and popped the chocolate into my mouth. After all, my kitchen floor is pretty clean and the chocolate had been on the ground for [...]
