Anti-cancer Fungi

Mycology, the study of fungi, is an often-overlooked member of the microbiology family. Having said that there are plenty of dedicated mycologists out there doing all sorts of cool stuff and plenty more fungal species doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

I have written about fungi before but only in the recent zombie posts and I feel I may have been a bit negative on fungi. Particularly when they seem to be capable of much good.

Zombies Pt 2 (or how I distracted my students)

Last week I mentioned how my students sidetracked me in a tute regarding introductions to the origins of life and in particular the acronym HOMR standing for Homeostasis, Organisation, Metabolism and Replication by initiating a discussion of whether or not zombies technically were alive. Well, the following week they had a test that occupied half the allocated tutorial time so instead of letting them out early I extended the discussion to real world zombies.

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.

The Australia Antigen

I feel a little left out some times on the internet as many (but certainly not all) of my bloggy friends are English or American. So, just to fill you in, the 26^th of January is Australia Day and it commemorates the landing of our first fleet in 1788 and the planting of the British flag in what was then known as New Holland and is now known as Sydney Cove, New South Wales, Australia. Most people celebrate the day with a public holiday, a beer or two, a barbi and the TripleJ Hottest 100.