Maureen writes:

“I am a PhD student in Ecology. I have toiled away the years of my dissertation working in wetlands across Ohio. The extended exposure to methane gases and gallons of blood donated to mosquitoes, ticks and leeches inspired my tattoo. In addition to the clear inspiration from my habitat of choice, each item in the tattoo symbolizes a very personal analogy in my own life – past, present and future. I’m pretty sure only nerds among wetland nerds can figure it out. Anyway, as you can see it’s still a work in progress. I have 18 hours in so far and have been working on it for two years. Only a wetland ecologist with a penchant for entomology would sit for such a tedious process, right?”

Continue reading “The Illustrated Swamp” →

My recent piece on Slate about E. coli, evolution, and germ warfare is now on their podcast. You can listen to it with this embedded player below, or grab the mp3 file.

It is very weird to hear someone else read my words. I feel like a teacher is using me as an example of how not to do last night’s homework. Nevertheless, I plan on recording some of my own previews of Microcosm between now and the publication date. Stay tuned. 

Originally published March 24, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

Matthew writes:

“My tattoo is taken from a 1950’s biology textbook. The reason it means so much to me is because of the relevance of the nitrogen cycle to the cycle of life. The horse dies, which feeds the plant, which feeds the horse. It’s really quite beautiful.”

Carl writes: We are each fleeting intersections of the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, the paths of nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and the other elements.

Continue reading “Nitrogen as Horse, Earth, and Air” →

My latest Dissection column for Wired.com takes on the old tug-of-war between Nature and Artifice. As I write in my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, scientists began to manufacture strange versions of the microbe in the early 1970s. In 1974, for example, scientists engineered E. coli carrying DNA from a frog. The difference between such “unnatural” bacteria and “natural” ones may seem obvious, but today the dividing line is surprisingly tricky to draw, and will only get trickier. In my new column, I describe the first systematic attempt to do so. Check it out.

Continue reading “Fingerprints on Life” →

Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I’ve searched far and wide. I’ve looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference–to viruses:

A particle of small-pox matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever. 

Continue reading “A Request For The Hive Mind: Did Darwin Write About Microbes?” →