Microbial Media and Bacterial Biofilms: #SciComm Round-up

Microbial Media and Bacterial Biofilms: #SciComm Round-up

So many excellent new videos and articles written to a general audience are being produced so frequently. Here I’m rounding up my favorites from May. Bacterial Biofilms TED-Ed (Scott Chimileski and Roberto Kolter): “The microbial jungles all over the place (and you).” In nature, yourself included, bacteria live in cities of mucus they and sometimes other microbes. This video does an awesome job of talking about the importance of biofilms for bacterial survival. It is a little surprising that they didn’t mention antibiotic resistance or issues with biofilms on medical devices, but it was refreshing that it focused more on environmental bacteria instead of human issues with pathogens. Gut Microbiome FiveThirtyEight: “Gut Science” – includes articles on probiotics, gut science’s WIERD bias, constipation worries, and more. There’s even a video “What Your Poop Says About You” General Microbiome PhD Comics  and Elaine Hsiao’s video “The HIDDEN World of Microbiomes” gets a 2 pili up rating for producing an excellent, informative video. I love that this video includes environmental microbiomes as well as the human microbiome. Certainly, and perhaps coincidentally?, this video was produced in partnership with the Kavli Foundation and released a few weeks before the National Microbiome Initiative. If this is the