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Microbes

Shedding more light on bioluminescence

Bioluminescence is the emission of light from a biological organism and was wonderfully introduced from a Ted talk by Edith Widder (if you haven’t seen it you can find the link here). The idea of this blog post was to dive deeper into bioluminescence and provide some more information on this amazing and beautiful process. The first question you may have is, “how is the light produced?” and the answer to this is chemistry. Continue reading →

#UoSmorestars or #UoSmoremicrobes?

  As a starter for this week, we are asking you whether you think there are more stars in the sky, or more microbes under the sea (FutureLearn). According to calculations, the global ocean contains approximately 4.4 x 1028 living microbial cells. (For anyone not familiar with notation such as 1028, 4.4. x 1028 means 44000000000000000000000000000 living microbial cells, or forty-four octillion if you prefer!). Continue reading →