Watching Tina Fey today was a scary reminder that there is a little election thing going on, and that I should probably cast a vote.  Though planning on being back east during the crucial day, I registered AK absentee (this form, the deadline postmark is Oct. 4, or you can email it in .pdf) I stumbled on google’s nifty election tool, which has registration and other great info wired to your location:

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From an exploration of how to apply ecological theory to bacteria and other microbes:

Surveys of 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequences have demonstrated the huge diversity of bacterial communities, but if much of the interesting ecological adaptation is conferred by the accessory genome
then the true ecological diversity exists in the rich brew of catabolic plasmids, resistance transposons and pathogenesis islands.

Emphasis added to portion with literary merit.