For Christmas a couple of years ago, I gave my family the black death, ebola, flesh-eating Strep, and stomach ache. Lest you think me some horrible person, I should point out that all of these nasty afflictions were represented by cute plush toys, courtesy of Giant Microbes. A picture of their version of E. coli (a.k.a. "food poisoning") is shown at left. They even have a toy version of the "bacterium" found in Mars meteorite ALH 84001!

I recently got an e-mail from the Giants Microbes people, and it reminded me of their unique products. I think they're great, and I just thought I'd pass that on. Several years ago, when I took a cross country road-trip, a Shigella bacterium from Giant Microbes was the Westy's trip mascot. Choose your microbe, folks. Make sure you wash your hands after playing with them.

Labels: evolution, products

A friend forwarded me a link to this interesting article in Mother Jones. After reading my discussion of Prius-induced fuel-conscious driving techniques on this blog, my friend recollected the Mother Jones profile subject, Wayne Gerdes, who gets 59 m.p.g. just by driving really, really consciously. He includes some maneuvers in his repertoire that are pretty dangerous, but the point is that he doesn't even need a hybrid to acheive these sorts of fuel efficiencies. Check it out.

Labels: oil, prius, products