Earth Day 2011

Okay so I missed it in my timezone but like beer o'clock it’s always the right time somewhere. Earth Day is an important opportunity to look at the way we use the environment and consider ways we alter our impact for the better.

Below is an article that I previously published in the Adelaide Advertiser, the main newspaper from where I live about a much overlooked but vitally important cog in the environment, bacteria. It’s about a year old and I have mentioned it before but some of the info is worth another look.

Happy Earth Day, for yesterday.

Earth view from Orbiter (modified from)

Yes We C(r)an(berry)!

That title is awful I know but I'm tired. Cut me some slack :)

 

I ran into a something that I have heard about before but assumed was rubbish and never really looked into it properly. A friend of mine insisted it was the case so I looked it up and I have to say, I was a little surprised.

So this is what cranberries look like. I never knew.

Capsular Polysaccharide and Pneumococcal Disease

This week looking at the capsular polysaccharide of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Want to know how I know? I wrote it :)

Insert stock photo of pneumo. Check.

It seems a little wrong to blog my own paper but in reality more people will read this blog entry than will read the paper itself, and that’s fine. Its relevance is very narrow and the work very preliminary but really it’s the drive behind the work that is important. So lets talk about Streptococcus pneumoniae (aka the pneumococcus or simply pneumo) for a second to set the scene.

What a week!!!

I have grown accustomed to the largely monotonous and repetitive life of a PhD student recently. Wake up, go to Uni, set up experiment, experiment fail, go home, sleep, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. But this week has been different.

There is significantly less Kung Fu in science than I was led to believe. Turns out its mostly repetitive bench work.

Flooding and disease

I’m not sure what the coverage has been like overseas but most of the east coast of Australia has been hit pretty hard. First there were biggest floods Australia has seen for a VERY long time that started in Queensland and continue to affect the east cost of Australia. Then, instead of letting Queensland off the hook for a few weeks nature hit the coast with a cyclone THE SIZE OF THE U.S.A. that might move so far inland that it could dump rain into my state, which is a desert, halfway across our island continent.