Best of the blog

An estimated ten million people lived in England in the 1300s, 90% of whom lived in a rural setting. The Black Death arrived on UK shores in the middle of the century and is thought to have killed between 30 and 40% of the population. Many people died, but why can’t we find their bodies? For our December podcast, I spoke to Alison Atkin, a PhD student from the University of Sheffield, about osteoarchaeology and how she’s using maths to solve the mystery. In the same episode, I interviewed Lewis Dartnell, from the University of Leicester, about his work adapting space technology to help staff identify bacteria on hospital wards.

The November edition of our New to science series might be my favourite yet. I’m constantly surprised by places that researchers look for microbes; in this post we learnt about Myroides guanonis, isolated from prehistoric guano paintings in Bulgaria, and Arsenicicoccus dermatophilus, which was found growing in the foot lesions on juvenile flamingos’ feet.

Right now, there are microscopic battles going on inside hospital patients across the world for the control of iron. The microbes want it; the body doesn’t want to let it go. I spoke to Microbiology Society (SGM) member Primrose Freestone about her work, which is helping us understand some of the methods that bacteria use to scavenge iron, in our article Battles in the blood.

The European Society for Virology kindly invited us to attend their congress last summer. We interviewed some of the speakers and have made a YouTube playlist of the videos we put together, they are on a host of virology topics – take a look.

BENJAMIN THOMPSON

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