Link of the day- Red Clover and Images of Outerspace

Hi. Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful.

First link-of-the-day today is this article on "The Garden Lady"'s blog on the Red Clover- I can't endorse any of the author's comments about the plant's medicinal benefits since I know nothing about the scientific research on this (or even if there have been any studies of its pharmacology), but it's an interesting article none-the-less-

http://www.thegardenlady.org/2010/02/15/red-clover-pink-purifier/

Today's second link is this "dazzling" gallery of images of outerspace released by NASA and other agencies, such as the European Space Agency- they include images of Asteroids, the Sun, Cassiopea and the surface of Mars.

http://news.uk.msn.com/photos/photo-galleries.aspx?cp-documentid=154300290

Third link-of-the-day is to this article in the International Herald Tribune about the activities of the oil-slick degrading bacterium Alcinovorax borkumensis (Alkinovorax- roughly translates as alkane- eater) in digesting the giant oil slick off the coast of Mexico-

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/science/earth/05microbe.html?ref=science

I wrote on this blog back in May that this would be the most likely end result of the spill and that the clean-up process could be speeded up by introducing this bacterium to the water (it exists in very low concentrations in sea water naturally)- you can find the link to that here-
http://victorianeblik.blogspot.com/2010/05/horseshoe-crabs-and-oil-spill-in-gulf.html
so now, at last, it seems to be happening.

Actually, I got the idea for that (no doubt scores of other microbiologists were thinking exactly the same thing, privately) by reading a great research paper by Susan Schneiker and colleagues some time ago. The paper- published in volume 24 (issue 8) of the journal "Nature Biotechnology"- described the sequencing of this amazing bacterium's genome and -essentially- went some way towards explaining some of its remarkable metabolic abilities. For what it is worth, there is a brief summary of the paper here-
http://ezinearticles.com/?Bees-and-Bacteria&id=2883002