Author: Matt Kristoffersen
If you’ve never played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, take a trip to the Oracle of Bacon, where you can see how far any actor is from Bacon in the Hollywood movie network.
And once you’ve played that game, check out my new article at Yale Environment 360 to see how ecosystems are a lot like Hollywood, at least when it comes to networking.
For more on ecological network theory, check out Jordi Bascompte’s web site.
Originally published January 25, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Here’s a talk I just gave on Big Think–about viruses, synthetic biology, and tapeworms that carry my name. The sound quality isn’t as good as I’d like, but I hope the words make up for it.
Originally published January 25, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
In my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, I describe how this humble germ helped make modern biology possible–and, in the process, has been engineered to do all sorts of remarkable things. In 2008, I blogged a fresh example, courtesy of Jeff Hasty and his colleagues. They retooled the bacteria to flash in clock-like rhythms. Now Hasty has taken another step forward, rejiggering E. coli so that millions of bacteria can flash in waves. The new paper’s in Nature, and the journal put together a lovely video of the bacteria in hive-mind performance. Check it out below.
Originally published January 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Anthony Lane reviews the new Darwin biopic Creation in the New Yorker. As is his habit, Lane manages to write some lovely stuff about a movie he doesn’t care much for (“at once slow and overwrought”). I have to agree with him on this, for example:
[Actor Paul] Bettany, with his jungly sideburns and smooth pate, offers a reasonable likeness of the great man, although he lacks the shaggy overhang of brow, extending far beyond the sunken eye sockets, which lent Darwin not only his solemn frown but, it must be said, his semi-simian air. I sometimes wonder if his tracing of our ancestry began not on his travels, or at his desk, but one morning when he glanced into his shaving mirror.
Originally published January 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Are antibiotics weapons of war, or a microbial language for cooperation? In my latest podcast, I talk to Julian Davies about the history and future of antibiotics, the marvelous yet mysterious creation of microbes that changed the course of medicine. Check it out.
Originally published January 20, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
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