Quotes About Bacteria

Could thorough chewing lower the national debt? If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds? Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? Why don't stomachs digest themselves? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? You

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface.

In about ten years, the genes of the AIDS virus change as much as human genes change in 10 million years. For bacteria, thirty minutes can be a lifetime. Human beings, whose generations are an eternal thirty years long, are evolutionary tortoises.

Even the human body contains many more microbial cells than it does human cells; bacteria swarm all over our skin and in our gut (and in many cases are necessary for good health).

Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact.

Just as a warm and moist environment is conducive to the spread of deadly bacteria, the worlds of politics and business especially—with their long time frames, complex outcomes, and murky cause and effect—are conducive to the spread of half-cocked guesses posing as fact. And here's why: the people making these wild guesses can usually get away with it!

prohibir a los médicos llevar corbata, porque, como ha observado el Departamento de Salud del Reino Unido, «se lavan muy de vez en cuando», «no tienen ningún efecto beneficioso en la atención al paciente» y «se ha demostrado que están colonizadas por patógenos».

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

Garlic: Whole baked garlic cloves not only will help blood pressure and cholesterol but will help detoxify the body from heavy metals, especially mercury and cadmium. Garlic was used during World War II as Russian penicillin, as it also neutralizes dozens of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. It is a perfect nutraceutical.

But one group did. By 3.5 billion years ago, bacteria had emerged, and continue to this day as the most populous kind of organism on Earth.

Domestic interior design is a fraught affair. It makes me hanker for the mild and soothing and tasteless red velvet interiors in which people lived so undiscriminatingly no more than twenty years ago. It was unhygienic, dark, cool, probably stuffed full of dangerous bacteria, and pleasant.

A newborn's immune system is underdeveloped, which is convenient because it allows for colonization by Mom's bacteria, but it's also why young children are prone to infection.

Baby's first colonizers are supposed to be predominantly lactobacilli, the microbes picked up in the vaginal canal. Lactobacillus sets up a healthy human gut with positive influence over digestion and immune functions. If other species of bacteria are baby's first colonizers, the baby's microbiome sets up differently, maybe harmfully.

range of chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breast milk might mean for the future of our children's health, we do at least know that we are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in ...our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

Whether it's through introduction of the right gut bacteria or direct modification of the genes of cows and pigs, I think we're going to have to introduce something like this into our livestock - a way to consume the methane rather than releasing it.

I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.

If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact.

If most of the natural "goodness" that bugs need to sustain themselves is removed from food products, what self-respecting bacteria or fungus is going to invade that food? They know better. They won't eat that junk—it will slowly kill them.

I don't get sick much because in the U.S. I always eat with my fingers, you know, to get used to the bacteria.

I never get sick on airplanes, which is incredible. You're basically in a flying petri dish.

We mostly don't get sick. Most often, bacteria are keeping us well.

I finally demonstrated that typhus infection is not hereditary in the louse.

We need to know more about how group A strep interact with humans to cause so many different illnesses.