What you're imagining, says Cecil Fox, is the security screening process at place like Little Rock National Airport in Arkansas, which Fox calls "the equivalent of a gigantic Petri plate 300 yards ...

There are small petri dishes, there are large petri dishes, and then there is MEGA, an enormous, 2-foot-by-4-foot slab of black agar infused with a gradient of antibacterial drugs. Researchers built ...

For this particular test, he placed petri dishes on the floor for different time intervals — from zero seconds up to one minute. After incubating the dishes, the results revealed that every ...

It is therefore important that any petri dish or agar used is sterilised before use, and that aseptic techniques are used to inoculate the plates. An inoculating loop can be used to transfer bacteria.