Bug soup

Looking for information to post here has encouraged me to look at Science, Nature, PNAS and several other Journals more frequently than normal. It has surprised me just how many papers are being published that are directly relevant to this course. In PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy 0f Sciences) next week will be a paper by Mitchell Sogin and others describing a new estimate of the microbial diversity in the deep sea. Only 5,000 marine microbes have currently been named but Sogin's study estimates that the true number of bacterial species living in the ocean could be between five and ten million. You can read the original paper in pdf form or check this link to google news as various newspapers and magazines pick up on the story.

Favorite headlines so far:
Enough to make you swim with your mouth closed
Marine census blows researchers out of the water
Oceans a complex, diverse bug soup

and my vote for least inspired headline:
Scientists` view of oceans might be wrong