The Secret Life of Yeast

My husband and I were having a discussion last night about yeast. Odd topic, I know, but it wasn't without reason. I'm on antibiotics at the moment and I was trying to explain to him what thrush was and why I had to eat so much yogurt. He tried to tell me yeast was not a fungus. Ok. Maybe from a culinarian standpoint I could understand, but don't argue with biologists about this sort of thing unless you want this up on the internet the next day. Now onto the science!

What are yeasts?

Simply put, they are single celled fungi (think worlds tiniest mushroom if that helps).

Eww, gross, so they are alive?

YES! That is what makes them so useful. You see, part of what makes yeast so helpful is that it breaks down (think digestion) sugars to ethanol or carbon dioxide gas. Without yeasts, grapes wouldn't be so delicious (the white film on grapes is a yeast) or couldn't turn to wine very well, we wouldn't have yummy leavened bread, there would be no beer or (gasp!) sourdough!

Where do they come from?

Isn't that a universal question? More specifically I guess you could ask where they are found naturally. Then I could tell you that yeasts are found almost everywhere. They live on the skin of warm blooded creatures symbiotically or parasitically, they live on plant leaves and flowers and roots, they live in salt water and soils, and they live in our intestinal tracts. They are one of our closest neighbors!

Can't yeast be bad, too?

Sure, but it's all relative. Many of the "bad" yeasts are actually not harmful in normal situations. Weakened immune systems, medications and age can make it so that your bodies normal bacterial level is thrown off and you end up with various forms of yeast infections. Pretty much what is going on here is that your body has a nice system of checks and balances in place and the lack of bacteria means more room for yeast and it is more of a nuisance than anything. In some extreme cases it can cause intestinal "parasites" to use the term loosely.

Now you are all caught up on your yeast knowledge! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments... I always reply.



Photo licensed under Creative Commons and can be found:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vatsug/ / CC BY 2.0

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e=mc2?

Many times myself and a lot of you have seen this famous equation used in Einstein's theory of relativity. Most of us have seen it, a lot of us can "say" what the variables stand for (energy is equivalent to mass times the speed of light squared) but what does it really mean? Math was never my strong suit in high school or college and you will be surprised that this famous equation can be quite simple when explained properly.
Quite simply the equation states that any amount of energy can be converted into matter and more importantly to us humans, any amount of matter can be converted to energy. Lets break this down a bit.....

This bottle contains one liter of water. If we plug this into e=mc2, this one bottle of water can produce 90,000,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) joules of energy. Whoa! Todd! You lost me!..... Basically all I did was take one liter of water which, with the ease of the metric system, is approximately one kilogram times the square of the speed of light in meters which is 300,000,000 meters/second. There! Do that easy but long number multiplication and you get the energy in joules!

But Todd, what the heck is a joule? Good question. We as normal people rarely use joules in our daily lives, well, especially in North America. Basically a joule of energy is how much energy it takes to toss this bottle of water 4 inches into the air. So something more practical would be 1 joule measured over the span of one second is a "watt".......100 joules in one second would light your typical 100 watt light bulb for...you guessed it ..one second! So, back to that bottle of water, literally that one liter or one kilogram of water could power a 100 watt light bulb for 250,000,000,000 (billion) hours or 28,500,000 (million) years! Imagine that while you drink this cool refreshing bottle of water. In your hand is enough potential energy to solve the energy crisis! Of course, to create fusion energy is a lot harder than it looks and very dangerous if not controlled.
What blog of mine would be complete without some tie to astronomy?
The Sun, which is small as stars go, produces energy equivalent to 4 trillion trillion 100 watt light bulbs every SECOND......that is a "4" followed by 26 zeros! The sun has been doing this every second for 5 billion years and will continue to do so for another 5 billion years. So the Sun converts 5,000,000 tons of matter every second.......that's roughly 5.5 Golden Gate Bridges every second! I'm tired of doing the math........5 of those bridges is 804,000,000 bottles of water to the 5th power.....somebody else calculate that....
Boy! I'm thirsty! :-)


Sincerely,
Todd Gonzales

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2010: Year of Biodiversity

As the new year takes off running, we also have a new something to celebrate. If you all recall, last year was Year of the Gorilla. This year has been declared by UN as the Year of Biodiversity. This is rather exciting for me since I am all about biodiversity and how things rely on each other. One of the first posts I ever did on Potspoon! was about it as well.

fig 1. a swamp biome

The official Year of Biodiversity site is up and running. Like with the gorillas, I will do various posts throughout the year and make a header link for this topic.

They list four reasons why this is the year of biodiversity but the first one stuck out the most: human's are a part of the earth's diversity and we are the ones who can protect or destroy it. On the site you will even find an interactive map with the locations of events around the world. So say your last goodbyes to the Year of the Gorilla and welcome in the Year of Biodiversity.

To find out more, click the links above or go to the United Nations Environmental Programme website.

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Year in Review

Ok, so I am a little late with this, but give me a break. :D

The following is a list compiled by using information from Lijit and StatCounter.

Busiest Days (only top three from most down):

January 28th: I actually had two posts that day. One apologizing for my page not loading correctly and the other was a kick off for my Year of the Gorilla stuff. Interesting.

July 9th: The day I did my poll about what colors to make the site.

February 23rd: One of my Monday Blues installments that SeaLaura keeps up with, but I suck at. I may just do them on Roogoodoo, instead.

Now I am sure you all know that those may have been my busiest days, but not necessarily my busiest post.

Busiest Posts

These were determined by number of visitors to my site via search.

Debate! Sex vs. Gender was a huge winner in this category. Obviously there are lots of people who look this up a lot. Surprisingly, this most viewed post has no comments.

A strong runner up was the Caribbean Reef Squid post. Many of the searches came from coastal areas and makes me wonder if it was due to marine science schools. I would like to think it was because of my awesome anatomy sketches!

Fig 1. awesome anatomy sketch!>

COPDPart 2: The Lungs was also a big one from the search terms "pictures of the lungs," "how the lungs work," and "anatomy of the lungs."

Recently, though, the numbers are steadily going up for searches on the Clearwater Challenge 3. This has been the biggest search in the past 2 months, but still hasn't caught up to the ones above.

What was your favorite post of the year? There were only 137 posts this year so it shouldn't take you long to review. Happy New Year!

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