Station II, Inaccessible Island

The second storm of our trip hit us while we were packing up Station I for a return to McMurdo. The winds began gusting over 50 miles per hour, and the visibility dropped to near zero. We had already packed up camp, but the orders came in over the radio that Condition 1 had been imposed on the sea...

Kudos to Ken!

JCVI Professor, Kenneth Nealson, has been selected by the American Society of Microbiology to receive an award that recognizes distinguished accomplishments in interdisciplinary research and training in microbiology. The 2010 David C. White Research and Mentoring Award will be awarded to Ken for...

McMurdo Sound

It took another day for the storm to blow itself out, but by Tuesday the wind and driving snow had abated, and we drove our Pisten Bully back out to our temporary shelter near Cape Evans. It took several hours of digging to clear the snow away from our vehicles, but once we started driving away...

Scientist Spotlight: Greg Wanger

Greg Wanger was 3.7 km below the Earth’s surface, trapped not only underground but also in a country distant from his native lands of Canada and Liechtenstein. He looked around him. It was very hot and smelled like rotten eggs. As many people do during their graduate careers, Greg pondered the...

Digging out from the storm

The next day offered more snow and wind: we still needed handheld radios anytime we ventured between the warming hut and any of the vehicles. The wind was so strong that snow began drifting up through the dive hole in the warming hut, and the windows completely glazed over with snow. At one point...

Out onto the ice

It took an enormous amount of effort, but on Thursday we ventured out onto the sea ice with our train of sleds and snow machines. The tucker is our strongest (and slowest) vehicle, and it is pulling both our yellow research sled and a pair of snowmobiles. The red Pisten-Bully is pulling a second...

Around Mac-town

We are now fully packed and our mobile research sled is ready to go. We are waiting for some final repairs on the Pisten-Bully which will pull our supply sled. The mobile laboratory sled will be pulled by the Sno-Cat Tucker, which also has cab space for six (riding in the mobile lab would probably...

Ice diatoms!

Today has been a day of preparations, as tomorrow we hope to leave McMurdo Station and head out on the sea ice. Our mobile sled is almost ready for deployment: the carpenters who work for the US Antarctic Program are quite amazing, and our sled has filtration racks for separating different sizes of...

Sea-ice class

Today Abigail Noble and I took a Hagglund transporter out onto the Ross Sea to learn the basics of sea ice safety and ice dynamics. The sea ice on McMurdo Sound can be 2 meters thick, but this ice is constantly changing, and when you drive along its surface, you can't assume that it is uniformly 2...

Construction of an Escherichia coli genome with fewer codons sets records

The biggest synthetic genome so far has been made, with a smaller set of amino-acid-encoding codons than usual — raising the prospect of encoding proteins that contain unnatural amino-acid residues.

Public Health is the Next Big Thing at UC San Diego

Researchers have swapped the genome of gut germ E. coli for an artificial one

By creating a new genome, scientists could create organisms tailored to produce desirable compounds

Genetically modified bacteria-killing viruses used on patient for first time

Hair claimed to belong to Leonardo da Vinci to undergo DNA testing

Critics, however, argue that this effort is flawed from the beginning

Students learn about genomics, a life in science, at J. Craig Venter Institute