Your body is covered in tiny fungal ecosystems. No, really, it is. And now, for the first time, scientists have mapped the places where fungus grows the most on your skin.

By genetically altering a microorganism that hangs around the blazingly hot waters near geothermal vents, researchers from the University of Georgia have shown that carbon dioxide can be pulled from the atmosphere and converted into useful organic chemicals — including biofuels.

Once you've taken our metal band or microbe quiz, check here to find out which will cause festering skin lesions and which are bacteria.

It's time to test your scientific acumen — or your knowledge of a very specific musical subculture. Plenty of microbes have seriously badass names. Lots of metal bands have names that sound like weird microbial diseases. Can you tell the difference between Thergothon and Eperythrozoon? Take our quiz!

We've already established that cheese-making is a pretty disgusting process, what with the traditional process of deriving enzymes from calf bile. But one group of researchers has tried getting the bacteria necessary for the cheese-making process from an even more unusual source: the human body. They've explored the…

Back in the late 1980s, scientists suggested that the sudden spike in allergy sufferers was the result of living in sterile homes and overzealous hygiene practices. Our immune systems, went the thinking, weren't being exposed to potentially important infections. A recent report, however, indicates that this "Hygiene…

Biologists who study extremophiles are dramatically expanding our sense of just how amazingly resilient microorganisms can be — insights that have serious implications in our search for extraterrestrial life. At the same time, these hardy microbes are also inspiring synthetic biologists to create their own strains of…

The initial phase of the Human Microbiome Project has come to an end — and with it, the mapping of the full community of microbes that inhabit all the various nooks and crannies of the healthy human body. The results of the exhaustive study will be published as a collection in PLoS, making their findings available to…

You've probably heard of necrotizing fasciitis, also known as flesh-eating bacteria. But bacteria do not actually eat human flesh. They're actually trying to gobble up something a lot weirder. Here are ten of the stranger things bacteria naturally (and unnaturally) eat. You'll never look at dirty underwear the same way …

In the Victorian era people marveled at what could be done by mixing and matching mechanical parts like the wheel, the magnet, the lever, and the piston. Today we mix and match biological parts like the gene, the enzyme, and the organ. Take a look at a new biological part that gives a microbe an 'off' switch.