Author: Matt Kristoffersen
Wired, April 3, 2014
Antibiotics save lives, but they also wipe out a lot of beneficial organisms that our bodies rely on, says Martin Blaser.
We’re in the midst of an extinction crisis, and it doesn’t involve Siberian tigers. Microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University School of Medicine says that many species of germs are disappearing from our bodies—and that’s a problem.
Continue reading “Antibiotics Have Turned Our Bodies From Gardens Into Battlefields”
Scientific American, March 2014
The Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt doesn’t look like a battlefield. It lies in peaceful, roadless isolation along the northeastern edge of Hudson Bay in Canada, more than 20 miles from Inukjuak, the nearest human settlement. From the shoreline, the open ground swells into low hills, some covered by lichens, some scraped bare by Ice Age glaciers. The exposed rocks are beautiful in their stretched and folded complexity. Some are gray and black, shot through with light veins. Others are pinkish, sprinkled with garnets. For most of the year the only visitors here are caribou and mosquitoes.
But this tranquil site is indeed a battleground—a scientific one. For almost a decade rival teams of geologists have traveled to Inukjuak, where they have loaded canoes with camping gear and laboratory equipment and trekked along the coast of the bay to the belt itself. Their goal: to prove just how old the rocks are. One team, headed by University of Colorado geologist Stephen J. Mojzsis, is certain that the age is 3.8 billion years. That is pretty ancient, though not record setting.
The Atlantic, December 2013
On April 28, 2009, a box containing a newly isolated virus showed up at Doris Bucher’s lab. She and her colleagues at New York Medical College opened it up right away. Thousands, or perhaps millions, of lives might depend on what they did next.
The virus was a new kind of influenza, known as 2009 H1N1. It had abruptly started spreading across North America in the previous month, and was beginning to appear in countries around the world. Once scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed it, they realized that the vaccine already in production for the next flu season probably wouldn’t be effective against it. And because it was so new, people’s immune systems might also be unable to stop the virus, which meant that it could become a global outbreak—a pandemic.
In 2009, I published The Tangled Bank: An Introduction. I intended it as a textbook for non-majors, as well as a guide to evolution for people looking for a thorough but non-technical account of how life has gotten to be the way it is. The project proved to be far more work than I had reckoned, but I was happy with how it turned out, especially thanks to the talented artists and designers I had the privilege to work with. The reception has been gratifying; the Quarterly Review of Biology, for example, called it “spectacularly successful.” A number of courses have adopted The Tangled Bank both in the United States and abroad.
It’s hard to believe that four years have rushed by since the book came out. A lot has happened in the world of evolutionary biology during that time, some of which I’ve tried to document here and in my articles. And so, next month, I’ll be publishing the second edition of The Tangled Bank.
Continue reading “The Tangled Bank 2.0, Ready For Pre-Order”
Dan Weston writes, “Given your interest in Moby Dick and tattoos, I thought you might appreciate my recent tattoo, based on an illustration by Rockwell Kent from the 1930’s edition (that I inherited from my grandmother and have read so many times that I had to have it rebound).”
Clearly, Dan has read my post from last year, “Herman Melville, Science Writer.”
For years I owned a copy of Moby Dick with Rockwell Kent’s dream-like engravings. The book disappeared a while ago, but the pictures remain how I see the story. The Plattsburgh State Art Museum has an online gallery of Kent’s illustrations here; I’ve reprinted the source of Dan’s ink below.
I think I need to buy myself another copy as a birthday present.
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 7, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.