Our newest book is finally here! Making the Modern Laboratory is a spectacular 504-page hardcover that tells the story of everything in the research laboratory and how it came to be, from pipettes to heat-resistant glass to microscopes and more. It features dozens of articles (most of which will never appear in print), 100+ full-color images, and original writing from 36 authors. It's printed on Arena Natural Rough paper from Fedrigoni. These books are THICC and would make a great gift for both the science-curious and the working scientist. :) We have spent the last year working on this project. It has been an insane labor of love. The best way to support our independent science journalism is to buy a copy. <3 Pre-order for $49, with free shipping: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…

When you go skiing in the winter, and see those big machines spitting out snow, know that they are spitting out purified proteins made from dead bacteria. I didn’t realize this until recently! Basically, they take Pseudomonas syringae cells — not engineered; a natural microbe found on plants — and grow them up in huge bioreactors. The cells make ice-nucleating proteins, which sit on their outer membranes and help ice crystals form. The cells are concentrated, freeze-dried, and sterilized until only these proteins remain. The reason these proteins are useful is because they help water molecules form ice more quickly. Water can remain liquid even below 0°C, and only freezes when enough molecules form into a crystal. The proteins have, on their surfaces, repeating snippets of amino acids that help water molecules organize into that shape. So these snow machines just blast super cold water with these proteins, and the two hit the air, mix together, and immediately freeze into snow.

I'm starting a new series: 30 Days of Biology History Day #1: Penicillin manufacturing during WWII was only made possible because of a moldy cantaloupe in Illinois. In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from a holiday to discover a mold on his bacterial plates. The mold made penicillin and killed the bacteria. Fleming published the discovery in 1929. He claimed that — being somewhat "absent-minded" — he had left his laboratory window open, allowing mold to drift in. This is the story taught in schools, but it's likely false: 1. His lab window was rarely, if ever, left open. The window story also wasn't mentioned until a decade-plus after the event. 2. Fleming claimed to find the plate on September 3rd, but his first notebook entry is dated October 30th. That entry doesn't describe a "chance" contamination, but a deliberate experiment where Fleming grew mold on a plate FIRST, then added bacteria. 3. Penicillin only kills bacteria while they're actively growing; it cannot kill mature colonies. Every attempt to recreate Fleming's experiment as described has failed. It only works if you grow mold first and add bacteria afterward. Chemists who initially tried to purify penicillin failed repeatedly. In the late 1930s, Ernst Chain and Howard Florey figured out how to purify the molecule and showed it could cure mice of infections. By 1941, penicillin was given to the first human patient, a policeman named Albert Alexander, whose symptoms abated but who died when supplies ran out. Scientists still couldn't isolate penicillin in large amounts, so they tried extracting it from patients' urine. (In 1942, a single patient consumed half of the United States' entire experimental supply. That's how little was available.) Around this time, Florey went to Peoria, Illinois to visit an agriculture laboratory and try to scale manufacturing. Fleming's mold only grew as a thin mat on the surface of a liquid, so scaling up meant thousands of shallow vessels stacked on shelves. It took about 2,000 liters of culture fluid to treat a single patient! The Peoria scientists solved this. They swapped the growth medium for corn steep liquor, a corn starch byproduct, and put the mold into 300-gallon tanks while blowing in air from the bottom. The mold circulated throughout the whole tank, growing in a larger volume. This boosted yields 500-fold. Still, Fleming's original mold was bad at making penicillin! So the Peoria team put out a public call for mold samples. Surprisingly, the best strain was discovered by Mary Hunt, a research assistant in the laboratory, on a rotting cantaloupe at a local market. It made about six-times more penicillin than Fleming's. This combination (better fermentation + a better strain) meant that, by D-Day in 1944, US companies scaled penicillin manufacturing to 2.3 million doses. The cantaloupe strain, dubbed Penicillium rubens NRRL 1951, is still the ancestor to all the mold strains used to make penicillin today.

Our @AsimovPress book on the history of the molecular biology lab is nearly finished. It's currently 455 pages, with 100+ images. Some previews below. We've spent the last 6+ months making this book as beautiful, and detailed, as possible. And we're excited for you to hold it.