"Our magic bullets have far more peaceful uses in the wild," says Marvin Whiteley at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to natural substances with antimicrobial activities. "Many known antibiotics are gene modulators, not weapons, requiring us to challenge our preconceptions about their ecological roles."

Public health officials, vaccine producers, and other experts with responsibilities for countering influenza outbreaks are scrambling to develop, evaluate, produce, and deploy vaccines to protect against both seasonal and the new H1N1 pandemic flu viruses. With so much at stake and many uncertainties, they also are reviewing a range of contingencies, even while acknowledging that circumstances will likely eliminate some of those contingencies and give rise to others. Key uncertainties as of late August included questions as to whether the H1N1 virus would better adapt to humans and become more virulent, how to overcome inefficiencies in vaccine productivity, whether to approve adjuvant use, what population groups are to be accorded priority for the H1N1 vaccine once it becomes available, and what strategy to follow in using diagnostic procedures, some of which performed poorly during earlier phases of this pandemic (Microbe, September 2009, p. 405.)

 Noah Fierer audio interview

 Airborne microbial diversity is much greater than expected, albeit spare compared to that in the ocean and in the soil, according graduate student Robert M. Bowers, his advisor Noah Fierer, and their collaborators at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and elsewhere, who collected their data at Storm Peak lab in northwestern Colorado at an elevation of 3,200 meters.