For the past few days I’ve been rushing around, first to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to talk to some people at the Marine Biological Laboratory about the E. coli book, and then on an infinite chain of connecting flights to come out to Aspen to participate in a science-media summit. It’s a relief to be finally sitting down in one place, and the view of the mountains from here making blogging very fine. But until my blood thickens up a little, I probably won’t be writing much.
Author: Lori Jia
If you want to know how a new word gets into Oxford dictionaries, or are interested more generally in the bubbling cauldron of modern English, check out the the first post of new blog from Oxford University Press, From A to Zimmer. That’s Zimmer as in Ben Zimmer, lexicographer, editor at Oxford University Press, and brother.
Originally published June 28, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
In the past few months, the New York Times science section has been putting together some special packages of articles, and this week’s bundle is on the topic of evolution. You can read John Noble Wilford on hominids, Nicholas Wade on recent human evolution, Carol Kaesuk Yoon on the evolution of animal development, and more. No animals for me, thanks–I got the microbes. Which is just fine with me. It’s a world of evolution I get all to myself.
If you sometimes look around and ask yourself, “So what is life, anyway?”–even if you haven’t ingested some illegal substance–you may be interested in a story I’ve written for Seed magazine. “The Meaning of Life” is the cover story for the August issue, which just turned up at my doorstep. The story isn’t online yet, but when it does pop up, I’ll make a note of it.
The idea for the story crystallized during the course of my work on my next book. My initial idea for the book was to investigate this very question, “What is life?” There is actually a lot of new research and thinking going into this ancient puzzle. But I recognized that I probably would not come out of such a vast enterprise alive, or at least with my wits intact.
Last November, scientists announced they had revived a virus that had been dead for millions of years. The virus belongs to a special class that multiply by inserting their genetic code into the genome of their host cell. When the cell divides, it makes a new copy of the virus’s genes along with its own DNA. Once it has installed itself in a genome, the virus can liberate itself from time to time, creating new copies. These copies can infect the same cell again, or wander out of the cell to infect another one. Some of these viruses, known as human endogenous retroviruses, may be harmless, while others have been associated with diseases such as cancer.