Tuberculosis (TB)  is a contagious disease of the lungs and other organs caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or M. tuberculosis) and which infects roughly a third of the world's population.  5-10% of those in the infected population become sick or infectious at some point during their lifetime. 

It might be an understatement to say I'm not really a fan of horror films. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I can't stand watching them. Even I will admit, however, that they do have one great redeeming characteristic: they're really all the same. Once you've seen one horror film you've seen them all.

The garden-variety horror plot features several basic elements. We start with a group of characters, all but one or two of whom will die in the course of the film. A few short scenes introduce us to the characters, some of whom are annoying, some of whom are sexy and some of whom are dumb.

One of the best things about humans is that we're home to so much wildlife. As you probably know by now, your bacteria outnumber your cells by as many as 10 to 1 [1]. They're much smaller than eukaryotic cells, of course, which is how you can play host to so many guests; moreover, your body offers a variety of habitats, each of which presents these fearless colonists with unique challenges and opportunities.

Whether it's the damp rainforests of the the groin, the dry deserts of the skin, or the soft caverns of the intestines, your body has all kinds of cool crevices a bacterium can call home.

The existence of multicellular organisms,  the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) has been extended from about 600 million years in the past to over 2 billion years ago, according to research published in Nature.

That means organized life is a lot older than was scientifically accepted, though older existence was obviously assumed because the first traces of life appeared in the form of prokaryotic organisms (without a nucleus) 3.5 billion years ago.    The "Cambrian explosion" 600 million years ago marked a proliferation in the number of living species and was accompanied by a sudden rise in oxygen concentration in the atmosphere.

Each day the humans are confronted with a variety of pathogens. Most of them are fended off by our immune system. 

For a successful infection, bacteria must deliver so-called virulence factors through a transport channel located in the bacterial membrane.  Scientists from the Max Planck Society and the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing have shown how in some bacteria this transport channel is formed like a syringe, enabling them to inject virulence factors directly into the host cell - an important starting point for the development of new drugs that might interfere considerably earlier than antibiotics in the course of infection. 

A new strain of bacteria  can produce non-toxic, comparatively inexpensive rhamnolipids and effectively help degrade polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs – the environmental pollutants that are one of the most harmful aspects of oil spills.

The findings on this new bacterial strain, NY3, of a common bacteria that has been known of for decades, called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, that degrades the PAHs in oil and other hydrocarbons were just published in Biotechnology Advances by researchers from Oregon State University and two collaborating universities in China.   Because of some unique characteristics, this new bacterial strain could be of considerable value in the long-term cleanup of the massive Gulf Coast oil spill caused by BP.