Meat-Loving Microbes

“Boiling Water Is Not Too Hot for Us!”—Preferred Living Spaces of Heat-Loving Microbes

Do you like to stay at the beach on a hot summer day? Sun bathing, chilling, and playing beach games? If it gets too hot, you can quickly cool off in the lukewarm ocean. Can you believe that there are living organisms on our planet that would still freeze on the hottest day of the year? These tiny creatures are called heat-loving microbes, and they do not grow at temperatures lower than 50°C, b...

Lice, Humans, and Microbes

Lice are small, wingless, minor ectoparasites of mammals and birds. More than 540  blood-sucking lice (Phthiraptera: Anoplura) have been described with each host having its own type of louse, suggesting the cospeciation of the lice species with their host. Among these, two lice species from two different genera infest humans: Pediculus humanus and Phthirus pubis (pubic “crab” l...

DNA or loving care?

to five contestants might be involved in child-custody conflicts. As cases of ART in which third parties are involved become more common, the issue of what constitutes a parent is now, perhaps more than ever, highly contested. There is no consensus on what parents are or what they should be. At the heart of the issue are at least two important questions. First, what is the relative importance a...

The ethics of loving care.

Sustaining metal-loving plants in mining regions.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 337 7 SEPTEMBER 2012 1141 COVER Artist’s conception of the complex network of relationships between disease and the human genome. Hundreds of diseases and traits (represented by colored dots) have been mapped to specifi c chromosomal positions in the genome. Most disease-associated genetic variants fall outside of protein-coding genes, instead affecting the genome...