Beagle blogging...

hello to our new beagleblogger nunatak. Reading her first contribution, she's set a high bar for future contributions. More, please. Elsewhere the Llamabutchers blog hails the project as cool. AOB: if anyone wants 45 minutes of finest kind, accesible scientific broadcasting you should click over to the BBC website and listen to today's In Our Time. Subject: Microbiology - the story of the invisible masters of the universe. The contributor were: John Dupré, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Director of Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, at Exeter University, Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at Aberdeen University, Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London.

Louis Pasteur, I learned, was asked by Napoleon Bonaparte to investigate why wine carried by the French Navy was spoiling. This was having serious consequences for La Republique because its sailors, unable to have wine, mutinied. Pasteur examined the wine, and tried heating it until the mal-microbes were mort. Et voila. Pasteurisation. Half of our precious human DNA? Probably spliced in by viruses over the millenia. Percentage of the microbial world of which we are utterly ignorant? 99. The last 15 minutes deal with microbes and their implications for evolutionary biology. It's really, really worth a listen.