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All the ducks are in a row, all the t's have been crossed and we have tied up all the lose ends. It's not very often you get a sentence with 3, count them 3, cliches, but it was needed to celebrate the official release of the 4th edition of Through the Microscope.
You can get full access to Through the Microscope in 2 ways.
For full instructions go to Buy this Book.
The eBook is also now complete. This is available to all subscribers to the website. To obtain the eBook, purchase a subscription to the website by clicking on the PayPal button. Once you have paid for a subscription at PayPal, come back to Through the Microscope and log into the site.* Once you are logged in click on the Download Ebook link in the Main Menu to download your copy of the eBook in epub format (compatible with iPad and many other readers) or mobi format (for use on the kindle).
*To verify that you are logged into the site, look in the upper right of the site and look for a LOGOUT link. If it says LOGIN, you are logged in and should have access to the downloads page.
Work continues on the textbook. Many late nights and vacation days have been spent getting the book refreshed and ready for the next round. A total of 23 chapters have been added to the text and are already available to subscribers of the textbook. With only 5 chapters left to revise, it’s time to start talking about what else will be added to the text.
I hope you are as excited about the new edition as I am. OK you probably aren't, but it's gonna be awesome!
This past summer and fall I have been working on the new edition of Through the Microscope and it is now taking shape on the web site. If you are a subscriber, you can already have access to the new edition as it is being built — yet another advantage of this effort being primarily a web textbook. Every part of the text was examined for effectiveness and relevance. Some chapters only went through minor editing changes, while others are in the process of being completely rewritten. You can check out the growing Table of Contents.
Both the content of the text and the organization were examined.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon at the U.S. Geological Survey had an idea. Arsenic (As) is just below phosphorus (P) in the periodic table, and due to the way electrons buzz around in its orbitals, it has many of the same properties. It is just a little bit heavier. As might serve as a stand-in for P in living systems, especially in places where P concentrations are low and As is abundant. Understandably, scientists were skeptical. While As does share many properties with P, it is not as stable in water. It did not seem possible that living systems could put up with this greater instability.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon set out to find microbes that were As users, starting with isolates from Mono Lake. Mono Lake is a hypersaline lake with high As concentrations, where the water leaves only by evaporation. An enrichment medium was set up containing glucose as a carbon source, vitamins, trace metals, no P, and the addition of As. She then inoculated a sample of sediment from this lake and demanded the cells grow without phosphate. Something grew! The microbe was transferred to fresh medium multiple times to make sure it was not just using stored P, yet it continued to prosper. Extensive analysis was performed and many of the experiments suggest that the arsenate is indeed incorporated into macromolecules. More analysis needs to be performed, but it appears this microbe is substituting As for one of the six major elements of life. This flies in the face of current dogma and will certainly need to be investigated further.
A new functionality has just been added to the microbiology textbook. You can now create self-study quizzes to test your comprehension of the material. To create the quiz, go to the Quiz Creation Page and choose the chapters and number of questions that you want from each chapter. When finished, hit the Create Quiz button.
The next page will have a quiz created from the extensive quiz test bank of the book, with the questions focusing on the material you asked for. Answer the questions and when finished, click the Grade Quiz button. The quiz will be graded and you will be taken to a page that shows your score, how you answered each question, the correct answer for each question and explanations. This is open to anyone who wants to use it, so test it out.