From almost the moment they were discovered, bacteria have had a rotten reputation. “Germs,” people called them. People scrubbed them away, developed drugs to kill them, cursed them for causing sickness and death. It turns out, however, that the 100 trillion microbes living in and on people — that’s ten single-cell organisms for every one human cell — are a fundamental component of human physiology.

No matter how much you study or how many Latin and Greek roots you memorize, it’s inevitable that some aspects of anatomy and physiology will leave you dazed and confused. But if you study within reach of an Internet connection, you don’t have to stay that way for long. Simply surf over to one of the following ten sites and start entering search terms.

Assisted reproduction goes above and beyond people’s usual ideas about how humans make babies. Here is a glimpse into what humans have been doing to help Mother Nature perpetuate the species. Fertility medication: Used to treat female infertility, these drugs are used primarily to stimulate ovulation.

After a decade of using home-grown processes to manage its back-end infrastructure, interior furnishings and manufacturing firm Havelock AHI of Bahrain decided it was time to bring in professional-grade enterprise resource planning. The firm, which has operations reaching as far as Russia and established branches in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, found that the customized legacy system could no longer carry the increasing scope and complexity of its business.

Doing business in a highly-regulated industry - particularly one overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) - requires keeping close tabs on every aspect of production, without fail. So outsources and vendors must fit in seamlessly and reliably with their clients’ workflow and needs. Hence, when SHINE Medical Technologies went looking for an enterprise resource planning system, the Wisconsin-based medical isotope manufacturer had to find an equally demanding technology partner.

It was supposed to cost no more than $21 million. That was six years ago. Now Loudoun County in Virginia has spent $40 million and counting to upgrade the ERP system for its schools and government services. But the project still is not finished. When the county’s Board of Supervisors voted in 2011 to authorize the $21 million contract with Oracle ERP system integrator Application Software Technology, they expected the new system would roll out in three phases over just a couple of years.

Priority Dispatch Corporation grew steadily in Salt Lake City for three decades, tracking its finances on Intuit QuickBooks and running the rest of the business on a combination of custom-built order processing and customer service software. There was no project management software, and no back-office applications.

But they were loathe to try to pull off such an ambitious operational move alone. Enter ERP consultant Vision33. With offices in California, British Columbia, the UK and Ireland, Vision33 has grown to become the world’s largest SAP Business One implementation partner. Flexicare wanted an ERP solution that would power all its international subsidiaries within a single unified software system.

With business booming in the healthy foods category, gluten-free manufacturing company Apogee Foods had upgraded its Dallas, Texas, facility to state-of-the-art equipment and a top-tier management team. But the company still relied on QuickBooks and Microsoft Excel to track quality control, human resources and financial data.

But they were loathe to try to pull off such an ambitious operational move alone. Enter ERP consultant Vision33. With offices in California, British Columbia, the UK and Ireland, Vision33 has grown to become the world’s largest SAP Business One implementation partner. Flexicare wanted an ERP solution that would power all its international subsidiaries within a single unified software system.

While enterprise resource planning software may have its roots in unifying record-keeping and reporting, its present and future are about fundamental digital transformation. That’s why SAP is expanding Leonardo, its Internet of Things platform, into machine learning, big data analytics and blockchain capabilities, said CEO Bill McDermott during his opening address at the company’s SAP Sapphire Now conference in Orlando.

Implementation of enterprise resource planning software can be fraught with trouble. In the case of brewery operator MillerCoors, it was fraught with more than $100 million in trouble. That’s how much MillerCoors says IT services firm HCL Technologies owes, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in Illinois.

We may know a great deal about how cells interact with their environment and each other, but we haven’t been able to get down to the nitty-gritty of how those signal pathways work at a molecular, or even cell-wide, level. Traditional tools like atomic force microscopy, optical tweezers and magnetic microbeads are much bigger than the individual receptors we’re trying to study, so they engage too many mechanoreceptors at once.

Researchers have known for over a century that cancer can spread along nerves as well as moving through the bloodstream and the lymph nodes. But little attention has been paid to the mechanisms of what’s known as perineural invasion. Until now. Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have identified a new cell type involved in cancer metastasis: Schwann cells, the peripheral nervous system cells that promote nerve repair and produce the insulating myelin sheath on axons.

Biologists now can see more clearly inside cells than ever have been able to before. But there are advantages and challenges to each of the new imaging technologies becoming available. So some of the brightest minds in cell imaging spoke Sunday at an afternoon workshop about the future of fluorescence microscopy and how to choose the right imaging technology for the job.

When CRISPR-Cas9 came on the scene in early 2013, the talk swirling around it focused on embryonic gene editing or whether it could be used to treat disease. But molecular biologists realized almost immediately what this cool new tool could mean for lab work. At a Tuesday workshop, ASCB members had a chance to hear the latest ways CRISPR is being manipulated to enhance research efforts in the lab.