Tangled Bank #89 up at Aardvarchaeology now. I haven’t had time to look through all of it but so far I really liked the entry about dogs and wolves.

Found this through Slashdot: USNews.com reports that Germs Taken to Space Come Back Deadlier.

“Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can’t sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it’s important that we understand … how they’re going to change,” explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.

Personally I can’t get over the feeling that what really happened was that some biologists went, “Hey, I wonder what happens if we put some bacteria in a spaceship!” It’s always possible to retrospectively invent a perfect justification for why a specific experiment was useful to us, but really, I think biologists just like to poke at things and see what happens.

biology, bacteria, space flight, salmonella