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So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum1.
–Jonathan Swift
(Who was actually writing about literary criticism: “Thus every poet, in his kind/Is bit by him that comes behind…”)
This week I wrote ScienceNOW’s take on the viruses that kill bacteria in [...]
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On NPR’s food blog, Eliza Barclay asks Is it safe to use compost made from human feces? After all, we use cattle manure compost all the time; you can buy it at any garden store. I was once hanging out at a horse barn when a gardener popped in to ask if he could have [...]
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Dolphin poop teaches us what dolphins eat. And also lets us know that we can stop collecting dolphin poop and go back to the old method of dissecting dead dolphin stomachs. Thanks, dolphin poop! PS. Dolphins eat fish.
This is a dolphin pooping. Thank you, google images!
If you love cetacean feces, keep reading. This one’s an [...]
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The microbe that nobody has ever seen, or grown. But we’re pretty sure it’s there. Iddo Friedberg likens the sequencing of a single cell to taking the helmet off the Stig. (What’s a Stig? Nobody knows, but it drives really fast.)
Would you like some chimpanzee poop? Inside you? Jeff Leach asks the question, but doesn’t [...]
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In football players who take lots of hits to the head, their immune system may be attacking their brain.
That shouldn’t be possible, because a healthy blood-brain barrier keeps antibodies firmly on the body side - but new research shows that even sub-concussive hits can cause that barrier to leak. Brain proteins spill through to the [...]
