Molecular microbiology.
I'm investigating a small metabolic pathway (series of chemical reactions) in Streptomyces coelicolor, which is a model organism for the genus Streptomyces. They're a group of mainly soil bacteria that are best known (well, in certain circles anyway) for their production of antibiotics, immuno suppressants, anti tumor compounds, etc. There's quite a lot of research into them going on, mostly for this reason.
The organism is really cool but also a bit of a bitch to work with, for various reasons I won't bother you with unless you really want to. Anyway, I included a picture to show how pretty they are. They also smell like damp forest (in reality it's the other way around of course, this being a soil bacterium).
The blue droplets (and very intense blue colour in the background) are a pigment they excrete. They consist of a class of compounds that can be antibiotics, but this one is rather weak. You'd have to take so much of it you'll be mistaken for a smurf. The colour is useful though, because you can keep track of its production very easily when trying out different growth conditions or when you mess with its genome or something.
I hope that wasn't too technical.. 
That's so cool! Hah, I'm so going to think of that picture next time I'm in a damp forest. I'm curious to know what you've discovered about it, and what brought your studies to those specific little guys in the dirt.
Heh, I'm a bit of a Wikipedia addict. There's barely anything on Wikipedia about your pet there (but you could change that!), though I did end up reading a little about its genus. Right before you posted your response to me, I had been trying to learn more about different types of single-celled organisms, so that was kind of a coincidence. Before that, I had been reading about arachnids and was directed to gregarines, which are parasitic to harvestmen (daddy longlegs), and that's what initially sparked my curiosity.
Many (maybe even most) of the articles I like to read are biology related. That's not to say I understand all of it. The other day, an analogy popped into my head: my enjoyment of those articles could be sort of like one of those cats that enjoy television, hah. Hopefully I'm learning a bit more than a cat would. I love reading that stuff and getting my imagination going about prehistoric life, learning how different groups are related, and becoming more aware of the organisms and processes that exist in and around us at all times. Mind-blowing stuff that makes me feel giant and tiny at the same time.
Man, and here I sit, writing a dumb-ass comic...
But seriously, that's awesome and the picture is much appreciated.
Dumb-ass comic? It's the best I've come across so far.
Look at it this way, this comic will be read by loads of people while I toil and struggle to write a thesis that, at most, 5 people will read.
Thank you for the huge complement! I do find myself wondering if I should have gone into a more important field that involved more learning. Being sort of a shallow cartoonist and a security guard doesn't feel too impactful, but I at least have the freedom to exercise my imagination, and having sweet fans makes cartooning feel way more worthwhile. I also get the feeling that picking one field of science as a career might make me feel stuck. Right now, I'm free to learn in whatever arbitrary direction my fickle curiosity takes me, though such unstructured learning makes for a really weird, random collection of knowledge full of holes in even the most basic concepts. I admire people who study our world for a living, and make it a healthier, easier, and cooler place to live in the process.
Cheers, I'm not many people's favourite European that's not a celebrity.
Maddox tweeted about you guys a while ago. I like his writing and he doesn't do spam so I figured it's worth a look. Turns out he was right.
Oh man! That's awesome! Maddox is super great. Have you listened to his podcast?
http://thebiggestproblemintheuniverse.com/ I don't think I'd ever really listened to a podcast before. I just started his this week and listened to every episode in two or three days as I was drawing the comic. Now I'm sad that I have to wait to hear more. Heh, even though it updates once a week with soo much more time's worth of content than our comic does. Unless you spend hours staring at each of our pages, which I guess I'd be cool with.
