While I was away last week on vacation, the New York Times published my feature on the hidden jungle that each of us carries, known as the microbiome. I was very happy to come home to a lot of kind notes, tweets, and various communications about it. Yet I would never claim that my article delivered the Big Scoop on the subject. After all, we’ve known about the microbiome ever since Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek scraped his teeth over 300 years ago and discovered wee animacules in the scum. And as I wrote in my book Microcosm, Theodor Escherich discovered his eponymous Escherichia coli over a century ago in a quest to catalog the good microbes in babies’s guts, hoping to thereby identify the ones that were killing the children in droves. Even in the age of molecular biology, the microbiome has been well-chronicled. Jessica Snyder Sachs wrote a book back in 2007 called Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World that I heartily endorsed (and still do).
Author: Matt Kristoffersen
I gave a talk at the President’s Forum at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in May about how I go about telling stories about science. The folks at ASM have done some slick video editing and posted the lecture at their site, where you can also download it in various formats. Or just watch it in the embedded player below. In my lecture, I talk about getting out of bunkers and jumping chasms, as well as the trouble parasites can get you into on a blind date.
MWV39 – Carl Zimmer: Newspapers, Blogs, and Other Vectors: Infecting Minds with Science in the Age of New Media from microbeworld on Vimeo.
Originally published July 19, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
The force of blog nature known as BORA! has decided he does not like the Pepsi aftertaste and is leaving Scienceblogs. I’m just back from a wonderfully rain-soaked vacation in Ireland, so I’m scrambling to get back up to speed. I won’t update my post on the scienceblogs diaspora till this afternoon. But in the meantime, read the epic farewell from BORA!
Originally published July 19, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
[An old post I’m fond of]
Scoop up some dirt, and you’ll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. Each slime mold prowls through the soil, searching for bacteria which it engulfs and digests. After gorging itself sufficiently, it divides in two, and the new pair go their separate, bacteria-devouring ways. But if the Dictyostelium in a stamp-size plot of soil should eat their surroundings clean, they send each other alarm signals. They then use the signals to steer toward their neighbors, and as many as a million amoebae converge in a swirling mound. The mound itself begins to act as if it were a single organism. It stretches out into a bullet-shaped slug the size of a sand grain, slithers up toward the surface of the soil, probes specks of dirt, and turns around when it hits a dead end. Its movements are slow – it needs a day to travel an inch – but the deliberateness of the movements eerily evokes an it rather than a they.
Continue reading “From the Vault: Us and Them Among the Slime Molds”
Maria, a paleontologist, writes, “Archaeopteryx, to me, represents a beautiful example of a transition fossil and of evolution in general, showing characters that both dinosaurs and birds share.”
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published July 18, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.