Austin was in the path of totality for the Great North American Eclipse. The weather was cloudy, unfortunately, but the crescent sun peeked through enough to elicit some OOHs and AAHs across the UT Austin campus.
Of course, the LTEE E. coli were going about their normal business and replicating during the event, a few hours after their daily transfer. We noted the eclipse in the lab notebook, but just to note the passing of time on human and astronomical scales rather than because it would affect their evolution.
The next total solar eclipse over Austin won’t be for hundreds of years… which is hundreds of thousands of E. coli generations, and also many human ones.
