microbes

There’s good news (the problem is fixable) and bad (a dry drug pipeline)

Frogs evolved to fight off microbes. They may also provide us with the next class of antibiotics.

Strange new clues in the search for extraterrestrial life

In the current issue of Maclean’s, I wrote about a global effort to track all the bacteria that live in the human body—a monumental undertaking, since they outnumber our own cells by ten-to-one. It may gross people out to think we’re literally crawling with bugs, but a growing body of research suggests they’re crucial to our health: by now, microbes have been implicated in everything from periodontitis, to obesity, to premature labour.