John Archibald

3 weeks ago | al.com | John Archibald

OpinionI saw a mother lug two young children onto a plane, one in each arm, like carry-on bags. She smiled silently but spoke with her eyes, apologizing for what she thought we thought was bound to disrupt our trip. It wasn’t necessary. We all flew across America in peace. Restful. For everyone but that mom. There is no rest for mom. My mother lives only in pictures, now, and in the memories of those who will miss her forever.

1 month ago | al.com | John Archibald

This is an opinion column“It’s not about being better than someone else,” he said. “It’s about being the best that you can be.”– Nick SabanI’ve been out of Alabama for a few days, so I missed some big stuff. Like Nick Saban playing second fiddle to Donald Trump at my alma mater. “I feel like I’m the warm-up band for The Rolling Stones,” Saban quipped at Trump’s University of Alabama commencement-and-me speech. I’m trying to imagine a Stones show on the Alabama campus these days.

1 month ago | al.com | John Archibald

This is an opinion column. I walked into a Piggly Wiggly in Alabama a few weeks ago, and I swear to Nick Saban I thought I’d been drugged. It was like every item on the condiment aisle had been stolen by aliens and replaced with an exact duplicate. Exact but smaller. I stumbled on, aisle after aisle, and it seemed everything was mini. I took photos to send to my wife, just to ask if I was imagining the whole thing. But it didn’t help.

1 month ago | biorxiv.org | Morgan J. Colp |John Archibald

AbstractAcanthamoeba castellanii is a free-living amoeba that is emerging as a model organism for the study of eukaryotic microbiology. It is one of the most widely studied members of the Amoebozoa, and is both an important grazer in soil communities and an opportunistic human pathogen; A. castellanii is thus of evolutionary, ecological, and biomedical significance. Despite its potential as a lab workhorse, the genome biology of A. castellanii is complex and poorly understood.

1 month ago | al.com | John Archibald

This is an opinion column. Some colleges across the country have tried to fight back against Trump administration edicts to kill programs that benefit minority students. Not UAB. That school can’t roll over quick enough. It is literally sending checks back to donors, killing scholarships to high-performing Black students rather than risk wearing the scarlet letters of DEI.