Author: Matt Kristoffersen
The novelist Jonathan Franzen delivered quite a rant about e-books the other day. He’s deeply wrong, as I explain at the Crux by going shopping for a copy of The Great Gatsby. Check it out.
Originally published January 31, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Thousands of papers get published every week, but every now and then a truly strange one pops up. On December 23, a new journal called Life published a paper by Case Western Reserve University biochemist Eric Andrulis called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.”
At Ars Technica, John Timmer unpacks this 105-page paper and delves into the weirdness, in a post called “How the craziest f#@!ing paper got published and promoted.”
Charles Darwin recognized that natural selection can make eyes sharper, muscles stronger, and fur thicker. But evolution does more than just improve what’s already there. It also gives rise to entirely new things—like eyes and muscles and fur. To study how new things evolve, biologists usually have to rely on ancient clues left behind for hundreds of millions of years. But in a study published today, scientists at Michigan State University show that it’s possible to watch something new evolve in front of their eyes, in just a couple weeks.
The scientists were studying a virus, which evolved a new way of invading cells. As a result, their research not only sheds light on a fundamental question about evolution. It also suggests that it may worryingly easy for viruses such as influenza to turn into new epidemics. Check it out.
[Image of lambda virus: AJC1 on Flickr via Creative Commons]
Originally published January 26, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
A fair number of scientists like to get a tattoo to celebrate their research. Ryan Carney, a biologist at Brown University has taken the practice one step further. He’s gotten a tattoo that shows the key finding of a paper he and his colleagues have just published today. They studied a fossil feather from Archaeopteryx, the iconic bird (or almost-bird). They conclude it looked just like this tattoo.
Carney collaborated on the research with a team of scientists who have developed a method to reconstruct colors from fossils. One source of colors in animals is a cellular structure called a melanosome. Depending on the size, shape, and spacing of melanosomes, they can produce a range of hues. It turns out that melanosomes are incredibly rugged, sometimes enduring for millions of years.
This Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences about Science Ink–complete with live tattooed scientists!
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
See you there!
Originally published January 20, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.