Author: Lori Jia
Jen writes: “Out of my interest for Chemistry and my heritage I chose to get his tattoo done almost a year ago. It is on the back of my upper right shoulder and it is a reminder of my philosophy for life “question all objectively.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published March 20, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Well, we’re down now to seven weeks till Microcosm hits the book stores. Here and elsewhere I’m going to discuss some of the fascinating things I discovered about E. coli–and life in general–while working on the book. For instance, I came to have a grudging respect for the vicious strain of E. coli known as O157:H7, which has caused outbreaks in recent years in contaminated foods. The weaponry it uses to attack and subvert our cells is quite impressive. But my respect went up a notch more when scientists recently reported how E. coli O157:H7 has been continuing to evolve into an even nastier bug. Over at Slate today, I explain why there’s a silver lining in this microbial cloud–it means we should be a bit skeptical that anyone is going to engineer a killer bug from scratch any time soon.
Continue reading “E. coli, Nastier Than Ever, Cause for Comfort?”
A few weeks ago I moderated a discussion about synthetic biology down in Washington. Excerpts from the talk (including the one above) are now posted here.
Originally published March 17, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Greg writes:
“I’m currently a Ph.D. student studying maths in Australia (submitting next week). The the tattoo on the top, I got about three years ago in Berkeley, CA. The other tattoo I got about a year later in Sydney, Australia. Both these tattoos are closely related to the research I’ve done for my Ph.D., which is in the area of elliptic partial differential equations. The top equation is called the Monge-Ampere equation and is the archetype of the equations I currently study. The bottom equation is called the ‘Infinity Laplacian’ and was chosen because it is correlated to variational theories which I find to be beautiful.
Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles is in Barcelona at the Evolution of Language conference, and he’s live-blogging like crazy. Fascinating stuff well worth checking out. [Link fixed-cz]
Originally published March 14, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.