Quotes About Microorganisms

Most bacteria aren't bad. We breathe and eat and ingest gobs of bacteria every single moment of our lives. Our food is covered in bacteria. And you're breathing in bacteria all the time, and you mostly don't get sick.

Staph lives on skin. That's the reason why many infections start as a boil.

Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillow-case will make a difference... Indeed, if your pillow is six years old--which is apparently about the average age for a pillow--it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.

Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman's vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.

They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do.

New Rule: Instead of killing 99.9 percent of germs, Lysol has to just go ahead and kill them all. Why spare the remaining 0.1 percent? So they can return to their villages and tell the other germs, Dude, do not mess with Lysol?

The oceans are thought to contain of the order of 4×1030 viruses, equivalent in mass to 75 million blue whales.

The way yogurt works is you take the old yogurt culture and you put it in milk. You have to put enough of the old culture in, and then that old culture will convert the milk into yogurt.

One begins to see bacteria, not as individual species, but as a vast array of interacting constituents of an integrated microbial world.

Bacteria, as a group, are, in actuality, an extremely large self-organized system that covers the entire world.

Staphylococcus organisms are "the leading cause of pus-forming skin and soft tissue infections, the leading cause of infectious heart disease, the number one hospital acquired infection, and one of the four leading causes of food-borne illness."23??? And

For nearly the entire history of life on this planet, 85 percent of that history in fact, life consisted solely of microorganisms. The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) for every life-form on this planet was bacterial. Again: The last universal common ancestor for every life-form on this planet was bacterial.

We should not be too proud of being vegetarian, for example. We must acknowledge that the water in which we boil our vegetables contain many microorganisms, not to mention the vegetables themselves, But even when we cannot be completely nonviolent, by being vegetarian we are going in the direction of nonviolence....Our effort is only to proceed in that direction.

Modern bacteria still shift from pioneers to colonizers and back to pioneers again, leaving ripples of concentric circles clear as a dartboard's rings.

Informationally linked microorganisms*29 possessed a skill exceeding the capacities of any supercomputer from Cray Research or Fujitsu. In a crisis, bacteria did not rely on deliverance via a random process like mutation, but instead unleashed their genius as genetic engineers.

The problem with all men, and werewolves in particular, was their odd perspective. Sean viewed the gash across his ribs as a scratch. I viewed it as an open wound made by a monomolecular blade able to cut through the werewolf armor and contaminate his body with extraterrestrial microorganisms and possibly poison. We agreed to meet somewhere in the middle. He allowed me to sterilize and seal the wound, and I promised to stop threatening to restrain him.

I have lately examined water, in which beaten pepper was steeped, and found two sorts of animals for shape, and each of those sorts to contain greater and smaller kinds: the greater I supposed the elder, the less the younger.

They're also a danger to us all, because they help foster the evolution of increasingly drug-resistant bacteria in our bodies and in the environment

In fact, there's no single species of bacteria that we humans all share. We house personalized zoos.

For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.

You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere.

concluded that the amount of heat exposure needed to kill off the wild yeast in honey is as little as five minutes at 150 F (66° C), or about 22 minutes at 140 F (60° C). I recommend the lower and slower approach.

To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we're killing are our protectors.