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Micro Mania: A Really Close-Up Look at Bacteria, Bedbugs, & the Zillions of Other Gross Little Creatures That Live In, On & All Around You!

A HUGE look at a very small, very amazing world! Here's a big treat for every kid who loves the squirmy, icky, buggy, and the generally gross. Sensationally designed, with eye-opening, jaw-dropping photography, MICROMANIA takes a close-up look at a world that's mostly invisible to us. It's an amazing universe that comes into astonishingly large-scale focus on these spectacular pagesA?A?which showcase everything from luminescent furry green bacteria and flowerlike virus cells to maggots, mold, and more. But this is more than just a collection of mind-blowing images; it's solid science that encourages children's natural curiosity. They'll find out about the great scientists who discovered the existence of microbes, see how bacteria travel and reproduce, peek at some of the insects that make themselves at home in our kitchens, bathrooms, and bodies, and learn why some germs are good and others make us ill and what we can do to stay healthy. By the time they've finished taking this voyage through nature's miniature universe, kids will fully understand why even the tiniest of creatures from foot fungus and salmonella to blood-sucking bugs and organisms squiggling in a pond near you can have a really big impact on our lives. Sidebars throughout go into depth on a variety of entertaining topics, including flea circuses and whether or not dogs or humans have cleaner mouths. Plus, there are really cool hands on activities for extra fun!

What you see here are colonies of Escheriscia coli (E.coli), which is a bacteria, gram negative rod. It is a part of normal faecal flora but is also the most common bacteria in urinary infection. It occasionally causes infections in other areas of the body.
The agar plate contains MacConkey agar, a special agar for gram negative rods, it contains salts which prevent gram positive bacteria from growing.

This is my mutant bacteria as seen under normal light. Not very spectacular, I know.
But the fact that it is growing at all is something important. The culture has an antibiotic that kills the normal strain. This lets us know that the bacteria picked up at least some of the introduced Plasmid DNA.

Antibiotic-resistant microbes infect more than 2 million Americans and kill over 100,000 each year. They spread rapidly, even in such seemingly harmless places as high school locker rooms, where they infect young athletes. And throughout the world, many more people are dying from these infections. Astoundingly, at the same time that antibiotic resistant infections are skyrocketing in incidence creating a critical need for new antibiotics research and development of new antibiotics has ground to a screeching halt!
In Rising Plague, Dr. Brad Spellberg an infectious diseases specialist and member of a national task force charged with attacking antibiotic resistant infections tells the story of this potentially grave public health crisis. The author shares true and very moving patient stories to emphasize the terrible frustration he and his colleagues have experienced while attempting to treat untreatable infections, not to mention the heart-break and tragedy that many of these patients' families had to endure.
Dr. Spellberg corrects the nearly universal misperception that physician misuse of antibiotics and "dirty hospitals" are responsible for causing antibiotic-resistant infections. He explains the true causes of antibiotic resistance and of the virtual collapse of antibiotic research and development. Most important, he advocates ways to reverse this dire trend and instead bolster the production of desperately needed new and effective antibiotics.
He also warns against complacency induced by the decades-old assumption that some miracle drug will always be available to ensure the continuation of our "antibiotic era". If we do nothing, we run the risk of inviting a bleak future when infectious diseases will once again reign supreme. Then many of the medical breakthroughs that we now take for granted from routine surgery and organ transplants to intensive care and battlefield medicine might all be threatened.
This crucial and timely book is lucidly written in terms that everyone can understand. It issues a call to action, explaining how, through a strong and concerted effort, we can all help prevent this nightmare scenario from happening. By following this courageous doctor's recommendations, we can assure that magic bullets will be there for our families and us in the future.