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Here is a video report on the news from a study of 30 Soda Fountains that showed 70% of them had "bacterial growth" present, with 48% of the bacteria being "fecal bacteria." The doctor interviewed said the bacteria could be present because an employee touched the soda fountain after "going to the bathroom" and no washing their hands, but that it also could be coming fro bacterial growth in the water line. The doctor advocated additional "regulations" to clean out the machines more frequently. . . . (VIDEO)

People who use bottled water as a fashion or life-style statement, or who think bottled water is better or safer than tap water, should take a look at this.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

Scientists have developed an atlas of the bacteria that live in different regions of the human body. Some of the microbes help keep us healthy by playing a key role in physiological functions. The University of Colorado at Boulder team found unexpectedly wide variations in bacterial communities from person to person. The researchers hope their work, published in Science Express, will eventually aid clinical research. They say that it might one day be possible to identify sites on the human body where transplants of specific microbes could benefit health. The study was based on an intensive analysis of the bacteria...

Bacteria are the oldest living things on earth, and researchers have long felt that they must lead dull, unfussy lives. New discoveries are starting to show just how wrong that notion is. For a simple, single-cell creature, a bacterium is surprisingly social. It can communicate in two languages. It can tell self from nonself, friend from foe. It thrives in the company of others. It spies on neighbors, spreads misinformation and even commits fratricide. "Really, they're just stripped-down versions of us," says Bonnie Bassler, microbial geneticist at Princeton University, who has spent two decades peeking at the inner lives of...

Bacteria can be used to turn dirty salt water into electricity and drinkable water, according to new research from scientists at Penn State University and Tsinghua University. The research presents a new spin on microbial fuel cells, which have been used in the past to produce electricity or store it as hydrogen or methane gas.

SYDNEY: Bacteria can solve complex mathematical problems and may form the building blocks of future supercomputers, according to a new study. Published in the Journal of Biological Engineering, the proof-of-principle study used glowing bacteria to crack the classic 'Hamilton Path Problem', showing that bacteria can be programmed to do maths. “Our work demonstrates the potential for using living cells to solve mathematical problems,” said lead researcher Todd Eckdahl, a synthetic biologist at Missouri Western State University in the USA. Complex mathematical problem “It supports the view that bacteria can be used to perform computations. Someday, living computers could have applications...

Data from an ongoing multi-year study suggest that people who consume deer and elk with chronic wasting disease (CWD) may be protected from infection by an inability of the CWD infectious agent to spread to people. The results to date show that 14 cynomolgus macaques exposed orally or intracerebrally to CWD remain healthy and symptom free after more than six years of observation, though the direct relevance to people is not definitive and remains under study. Cynomolgus macaques often are used as research models of human disease because they are very close genetically to humans and are susceptible to several...

As the space shuttle returned to Earth, bringing him home from the International Space Station, where he has been since March, he revealed that he had been wearing the same pair of prototype pants for a month, all in the name of science.

BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) — High-throughput sequencing has turned biologists into voracious genome readers, enabling them to scan millions of DNA letters, or bases, per hour. When revising a genome, however, they struggle, suffering from serious writer's block, exacerbated by outdated cell programming technology. Labs get bogged down with particular DNA sentences, tinkering at times with subsections of a single gene ad nauseam before moving along to the next one. A team has finally overcome this obstacle by developing a new cell programming method called Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE). Published online in Nature on July 26, the platform...

Sticky nanotubes that trap bacteria like flypaper can be used to identify bacterial infections in seconds rather than days, report Spanish chemists. Although only tested on the typhus-causing Salmonella typhi bacteria so far, if the process can be applied more widely it could revolutionise bacterial testing in the medical and food industries. Detecting bacteria is currently a laborious process, requiring several stages that can take up to two days. Instead, this new method promises to be as easy as testing for pH, say researchers at the Universityof Rovira i Virgili in Catalonia, Spain. The technique uses carbon nanotubes coated with aptamers -...

After more than 120,000 years trapped beneath a block of ice in Greenland, a tiny microbe has awoken. The long-lasting bacteria may hold clues to what life forms might exist on other planets. The new bacteria species was found nearly 2 miles (3 km) beneath a Greenland glacier, where temperatures can dip well below freezing, pressure soars, and food and oxygen are scarce. "We don't know what state they were in," said study team member Jean Brenchley of Pennsylvania State University. "They could've been dormant, or they could've been slowly metabolizing, but we don't know for sure." Dormant would mean...

A total of 17 people have been infected with Clostridium difficile at a hospital in Moray. NHS ...revealed on Wednesday that two elderly people with the C.diff infection had died. Two wards have been closed to new admissions but health officials said the patients were giving no cause for concern. The health board said the deaths happened in April and that both the patients had been frail.

The organisms that inhabit the skin may not be the bad guys. They probably enable the body to function properly, researchers say in the journal Science. Here's a finding that'll make your skin crawl: A healthy human epidermis is colonized by roughly 1,000 species of bacteria. Furthermore, the microorganisms have evolved to exploit the unique attributes of those body parts they call home, according to a study to be published today in the journal Science. Some thrive in the desert of the forearm. Others are happiest in the tropical rain forest of the armpit. The study, conducted by a team...

Viral Batteries: A Case for Evolution? by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Researchers at MIT have invented a “greener” battery with the help of viruses. Three years ago, they engineered a virus that coats itself with material that serves as an anode, a structure within a battery that attracts positive ions. They have now engineered a virus (bacteriophage) that serves as a cathode, which indirectly links to the anode to help make the battery functional. The result is a battery with little impact on the environment. National Public Radio (NPR) ran a report on its Morning Edition that compared the development of...

A new weapon that could help wipe out the deadly MRSA virus has been developed by researchers from Northern Ireland. Experts from Queen’s University have discovered new agents that can kill colonies of MRSA and other antiboitic resistant hospital-acquired |infections. The antimicrobial agents also prevent any growth of the potentially lethal bacteria. The breakthrough was made by a team of eight researchers from the Queen's University Ionic Liquid Laboratories (QUILL) Research Centre led by Brendan Gilmore, a lecturer in Pharmaceutics, and assistant director of QUILL Dr Martyn Earle. The discovery has been published in the |scientific journal, Green Chemistry. Dr...

'Live Evolution' Not Witnessed After All by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Some science media outlets are hailing a recent study as “live evolution witnessed,” but what researchers at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique actually saw isn’t evolution at all. They observed, over the course of 300 generations, predator bacteria adapting to overcome certain defenses erected by its prey. The kinds of minor changes that these bacteria experienced, however, do not support the broad Darwinian philosophy that life continually evolves upward...

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory March 13, 2009 — The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on the “protein big bang” found on Astrobiology Magazine...

According to Darwinian theory, in the past we had a common ancestor with baboons, further back with bananas and still further with bacteria. This dogma has spread like a ‘meme’, which is a contagious idea that propagates in a similar way as a virus by infecting brains, according to inventor of the word, Richard Dawkins.1 In 2002, Roy Britten dispelled the first monkey meme that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences are 98.5% identical.2 He showed that when indelmutations were also taken into account, the difference suddenly became about 5%. The fact that chimpanzee genomes are about 10% larger than that...

American energy independence may be closer than anyone realizes, and one of the most promising sources is neither wind nor solar nor oil nor coal nor even nuclear – as useful as all of the above may be in their own right. It is biomass, especially bacteria – genetically manipulated to produce hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline and diesel. I wrote about this in May 2008, and in the eight months since then the people involved have made so much progress that a major announcement is scheduled for next week in Washington D.C. My prior column explained the efforts of Tifton,...