ilovebacteria.com

Last week was National Science Week and, to celebrate this momentous occasion, I took part in a day of science experiments with a bunch of GCSE and ‘A’ level students. Thanks to the lovely English tabloids, I cannot help feel a mild sense of trepidation when faced with a load of 16-18 year olds. Are they going to shout abuse when I ask them to fill in a worksheet? In short, no.

Can you believe that there are people out there who find the prospect of using a Gilson to load a DNA gel exciting? Or can come up with questions like ‘Do GFP-expressing pigs see in shades of green?’ It turned out to be a lot of fun and I ended up giving my email address to one science teacher, who wants someone to come into her classes to talk about scientific research and help out with some experiments. So I began trying to come up with fun bacteria-related practical demonstrations that will make microbiology exciting to people who aren’t quite as geeky as I am.

Bacteria doesn’t exactly have the best image among the general public. When it isn’t viciously murdering the helpless in hospitals, it is contaminating your kitchen surfaces and putting our kids at risk. Thankfully, we have all these amazing cleaning products that kill 99.9% of bacteria or restore the balance of good bacteria in our guts. But, hang on, does anyone actually stop to question whether there is really any evidence to back up the claims of commercial organisations? Have we all been taken in by all those adverts that dress up their products with scientific sounding spin?

Maybe these products work, maybe they’re actually a pile of nonsense. But hands up how many of us have bought a probiotic drink without first attempting to hunt down the peer-reviewed literature to check out whether there has been any studies to suggest that ingesting milky drinks crammed full of lactobacillus really does do us some good? Does anyone stop to wonder if our guts really are so unbalanced that we need to stock up on ‘good bacteria’? And do these drinks even contain enough bacteria to stand a chance of competing with everything else that’s already living in our intestines?

So my idea for the ‘A’ level students is to get them to investigate the representation (or misrepresentation) of science in the media and adverts. How many products use science to sell them to the public? What do the claims made about these products really mean? How many have proven scientific principles behind them? Can we reproduce any of the supposed affects of these products in controlled experiments? Even if I put an entire class off a science career, hopefully I’ll make them start questioning all the supposed ‘science’ we’re all subjected to on a day to day basis.

I love DMOZ - the open directory project. They have real living, breathing human beings approving every site that gets listed, meaning that you don’t have to wade through all the rubbish out there on the net to find what you’re looking for.

And for web developers, it is a godsend which can propel your meagre little web site from its lonely pit of despair in the deepest, darkest bowels of the web, to a position of greatness with daily visitor numbers well into the double figures! See, there are all those mirror sites that just publish the DMOZ directory on their own pages. Sure, this is annoying when you type your search query into Google and the first 69,877,566 hits returned are all pretty much the same, but it’s even more annoying if you own the website which is hit number 69,877,567.

If it hadn’t been for the nice editors deciding to list my first attempt at a web site, I don’t think anyone would have happened upon poor old ratlab.co.uk, and what a joy would have missed out on by so many. So much of a fan of DMOZ was I, that I decided to become an editor for this vast collection of over 4 million web sites and, for a few months at least, I happily logged on to the site and approved or denied the huge numbers of sites (4 or 5) being suggested by eager little web developers. Perhaps my standards were a little bit high as my decisions were often over-ruled by my superior editor. But all the same, I was doing my bit for the small but significant Kids_and_Teens/School_Time/Science/Experiments corner of the web. Us Kids_and_Teens editors were the coolest of the cool, we even had our own message boards and a pretty coloured link on the front page of the main site, while all the other dull categories had to make do with plain blue. But I digress. In the end, this editor-lark, like many of my projects, soon fizzled out, as did the original web site that had first led me to DMOZ.

But now that I have returned with a vengeance, I am somewhat miffed that I can’t seem to get my replacement at DMOZ to approve ilovebacteria.com. My own editor account has sadly been removed through inactivity, not that I was planning to log in and just add my site myself of course (my solemn editor’s oath to uphold the principles the Kids_and_Teens category would mean I would immediately go to hell should I commit this ultimate of crimes). So what am I to do? Does this mean I might actually have to do all that SEO nonsense all on my lonesome?