I really don’t have a lot to say today, just feeling a lot of rage and uncertainty. Posting these today because sometimes you have to hold on to whatever you can find, and the common theme of reading this week is life finds a way…under even the most hostile of circumstances.

• This virus, I feel, has cut through so many of the issues in our society, I can only hope we learn something from the experience and make some changes…I liked this a lot – let’s use the opportunity to support more accessible, community-serving education. And Kim Stanley Robinson’s piece is interesting too – how will we change how we think about crisis moving into a future of climate change?
• I am forever fascinated by the ways life manages to thrive in unlikely locations. And well, microbes extracting water from rock is incredible to think about (the paper is here, though sadly not open access).
• Relatedly, subsurface life!
• How do you crack open a giant virus? A cool study using cryo-EM + identifying proteins released when the virus opens. Includes fantastic viral terminology such as “stargate vertex” and “starfish seal,” what could be better? (press release here, paper here).
• Reducing methane emissions with cable bacteria! (paper here)
• I’ve been fascinated by this for a while: viruses sometimes are useful to their hosts under certain conditions. Here a virus is lurking in a common marine bacteria, and may play a role in its success (paper here).