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This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks. By Laurie Garrett. Published in 2011.
Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz
March 26, 2012
Continue reading “I Heard the Sirens Scream: Laurie Garrett Takes on 9/11 & Anthrax”
Discover, March 20, 2012
If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains.
WIRED, March 20, 2012
There’s a moment in the history of medicine that’s so cinematic it’s a wonder no one has put it in a Hollywood film. The scene is a London laboratory. The year is 1928. Alexander Fleming, a Scottish microbiologist, is back from a vacation and is cleaning up his work space. He notices that a speck of mold has invaded one of his cultures of Staphylococcus bacteria. It isn’t just spreading through the culture, though. It’s killing the bacteria surrounding it.
Fleming rescued the culture and carefully isolated the mold. He ran a series of experiments confirming that it was producing a Staphylococcus-killing molecule.
Continue reading “Antiviral Drugs Could Blast the Common Cold—Should We Use Them?”
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth. By Gael McGill, Edward O. Wilson, and Morgan Ryan. Published by Wilson Digital, 2012.
Reviewed by John Hawks
March 19, 2012
Continue reading ““Life on Earth”: the future of textbooks?”
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives. By Rachel Armstrong.
Reviewed by Annalee Newitz
March 16, 2012