Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 52
January 10, 2012
Resurrecting Evolution to Solve an 800-Million-Year-Old Puzzle
This is a story of about how the parts of a puzzle locked into place 800 million years ago. The puzzle is an ion pump that you can find in any mushroom, mold, or yeast. I've reproduced a picture of it here.
Fungus cells, like our own cells, have lots of little pouches inside of them for carrying out special kinds of chemical reactions. In order for those reactions to work, there have to be a lot of positively-charged protons inside the pouches. To get those protons into the pouches, ion pumps like this one force them through membranes.
This pump (which is is offically known as a vacuolar ATPase complex) is a wonderfully complex collection of proteins. They fit together elegantly, and they cooperate to get this vital job done. One particularly cool feature of this pump is the ring lodged in the pouch's membrane, where it spins around like a wheel. The ring is made up of six proteins–four copies of a protein called Vma3, and a single copy of two other proteins called Vma11 and Vma16–that lock together. If a mushroom can't make all three types of proteins, ...
January 9, 2012
The Wall Street Journal ogles tattoos, and more #scienceink news
1. Good morning. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal features Science Ink in their Visualizer Column. I stopped by their offices on Friday and recorded an interview with WSJ editor Gary Rosen, which I've embedded below.
2. In other news…Amazon has Science Ink back in stock, and they're offering it at half price.
3. The Huffington Post Science section featured Science Ink, which surely must bode well for its future.
4. I'll be on the radio this week talking about the book–details to come!
5. Finally, let me just remind New Yorkers that I'll be speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences about Science Ink on Tuesday, January 24, at 7 pm.
Here are some of the details…
When: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. (A reception will follow.)
Where: The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600
Get $10 dollars off admission by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here:http://www.nyas.org/scienceink
January 5, 2012
Huffington Post + Science. A New Leaf?
Today the Huffington Post is launching a new science "channel," overseen by a full-time science editor. This should be interesting.
The Huffington Post is one of the most popular places for getting news and opinion, attracting well over 30 million views a month. It started out mainly as a blogging network, and then added on a lot of aggregation of news stories, supplemented by slide shows. More recently, they've been hiring full-time reporters and editors on subjects like politics and economics.
When it comes to science, this set-up has led to some…well, let's call it checkered coverage. You could find your way to straight news stories about science from the Associated Press and other outlets, along with some lightly re-written syntheses of articles elsewhere. Some strong voices in the science world paid visits from time to time to share some thoughts. But the Huffington Post has also run some real stinkers in the past–the kind that send readers to the ER with foreheads fractured by particularly powerful desk-slams.
This morning, Arianna Huffington herself introduced the channel with a long post. Here's its opening:
I'm delighted ...
January 4, 2012
A Planet of Viruses: A Booklist Editor's Choice of 2011
Thanks to Booklist for a late Xmas present: they put A Planet of Viruses on their Editor's Choice 2011 list!
The book is currently available in hardback and ebook; the paperback will come out in May.
January 3, 2012
January 24: Science Ink comes to the New York Academy of Sciences
Greetings, Gothamites! If you're free Tuesday, January 24, please join me for a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. I'll be delivering an anthropological lecture about an intriguing sub-culture that expresses itself with body inscriptions. I speak, of course, of scientists with tattoos.
At my last talk, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the evening was enhanced with the presence of actual, flesh-and-blood scientists with tattoos, some of whom appear in the pages of Science Ink. If you are a member of this inky, geeky clan and are planning on coming to the New York talk, please let me know so that I can try to work you into the presentation.
Here are some of the details…
When: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. (A reception will follow.)
Where: The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600
Get $10 dollars off full-price tickets by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here: http://www.nyas.org/scienceink
January 2, 2012
The Cosmic Performance: My new profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson
I've just written a profile of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the best-known scientific figure in America. Here's how it opens:
On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon has appeared briefly and then slipped below the western horizon, leaving the sky to blinking airplanes rising from La Guardia fifty miles to the south, to satellites gliding in low orbit, to Jupiter and its herd of moons and to the great river of the Milky Way beyond.
The crowd that sits in this chilly field in North Salem, New York, is surrounded by a ring of telescopes. There's a Dobsonian, a giant barrel-shaped contraption that's so tall you have to climb a stepladder to look through its eyepiece. Small, squat Newtonian cylinders sit on tripods, rigged to computers that give off a weak lamp-glow from their monitors. A few older men are fussing over the telescopes, but everyone else is ...
December 30, 2011
2011: A Letter from the Loom
In 2011, the Loom reached its eighth birthday. Thanks to everyone who's paid a visit or become a loyal reader in that time. With the year coming to a close, I spent a little time this week perusing the Loom's archive, reflecting on the things that obsessed me during 2011.
More than many years, this one reminded me just how huge science is. Even if you limited yourself to the most important stories of this past year, there was just too much to keep up with. (Here's Discover's top 100 picks.) As a science writer, my focus is biology, but that didn't ease my year-long case of head-spinning. The anchors that kept me from spinning away completely were the very small and the very complicated.
At the small end of the spectrum were, among other things, the bacteria that call us home. Like every year, 2011 saw outbreaks, such as the E. coli that sickened thousands in Germany. But now that we can read the genomes of these killers, as I noted in Newsweek, we can see how chillingly fast new pathogens can evolve.
But the good germs also ...
December 22, 2011
Strain Game: My piece on bird flu, terrorism, and open science in Slate
Eckard Wimmer makes viruses from scratch. When he first made a polio virus out of raw ingredients in 2002, some congressmen drafted a resolution to condemn him. Today, he's making viruses that act like vaccines.
Wimmer was one of several virologists I called over the past couple days to talk about the controversy swirling around altered bird flu viruses that have the scientific community deeply worried. Their reactions are all over the board, from those who think the research shouldn't have even been done in the first place to others who want the research published in full and replicated many times over. My report is over at Slate. It's a debate that gets to the heart of the scientific process in the twenty-first century. Check it out.
XMRV takes another step to de-discovery?
I've written a few times here about the battle over a virus called XMRV, and its supposed link to chronic fatigue system. I just wanted to point this morning to a few articles by some fine writers about the latest twist: the paper that first claimed a link has been completely retracted.
December 21, 2011
The Rise of the E-book: My new essay for Nature
In this week's issue of Nature, I write about the revolution that technology is bringing to the world of books. It's a subject that's been on my mind a lot recently. I've been experimenting with e-books myself, and I've been giving some talks about them (I'll be helping to lead a discussion at Science Online 2012 in January).
My essay is accompanied by this funny picture. The guy looks a lot like me, but, strictly speaking, it should be my wife sitting atop the pile of books, with seagulls for company:
In the summer of 2010, on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, I saw the future of books. I had been invited to teach a writing course at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, a beautiful bulge of rock covered in scrub and herring-gull nests. During a break at the beach with my family, my wife finished reading her book with typical supersonic speed. She craved another, so decided to experiment with her new iPhone.
She tapped the screen. In seconds, an e-book had streamed invisibly through the air into her ...
