Inner Workings: Ancient teeth reveal clues about microbiome evolution

Inner Workings: Climate change frees ancient artifacts.

Inner Workings: Taking evolution to the clinic.

Andrew Read is most at home around mice, mosquitoes, malaria, and math. An evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Read has built a career working with animal and theoretical models to study how pathogens develop drug resistance. Yet after 30 years in the laboratory, he decided to investigate a different biological system: doctors and patients. Read sought a un...

Inner Workings: Companies seek food safety using a microbiome approach.

In a pet food factory in Reno, NV, researchers from IBM Research and Mars, Inc. are conducting an experiment that may someday revolutionize food safety. For more than two years, they’ve taken regular samples of poultry meal—a protein-rich mash of chicken parts—as it enters the factory on its way to becoming pet food. Each sample of this raw material contains a vast community of living bacteria ...

Inner workings: Roboclam.

Calla Cofield Science Writer Digging in the sand might seem like child’s play, but doing it efficiently has stumped many adult engineers. As is often the case, nature has revealed a superior solution: this time in the Atlantic razor clam, which can burrow into and out of sandy ocean bottoms more efficiently than man-made, mechanical anchors. In 2008, Amos Winter, a professor of mechanical engin...

Inner workings: Malnutrition, gutted.

In 2010, Rashidul Haque spent a week at Washington University in St. Louis getting up to speed on a seemingly unpleasant task: the art and practice of collecting and storing human excrement. By learning the necessary steps for sample preservation and DNA extraction, Haque, who has spent the past 25 years developing new ways of diagnosing pathogens from clinical stool samples as head of the para...