Snow business

Everyone knows not to eat yellow snow but apparently we can’t even eat new snow as it falls out of the sky. With one beautifully neat experiment, microbiologist Brent Christner has shown that snow is chock full o bacteria. Christner wondered how bacteria were infecting wheatfields, and waved a petri dish out of an plane window to find out where it was coming from. Sure enough, he found that there were bacteria in the atmosphere, which were not only hitching a lift back to earth IN snow, they were causing the snow to form. Bad news for children (like Calvin) who want to catch snow on their tongues, good news for the bacteria floating around the globe from snowstorm to snowstorm.