Over the past year or so I’ve gotten to know some extraordinary people. They were born with a single mutation to a single gene that caused them to grow a second skeleton. Their condition, called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, affects only one person out of every two million. If you traveled across the entire the United States and gathered everyone with the condition, you could fit them all comfortably on a single Greyhound bus.

I was inspired to meet them on a visit to Philadelphia last summer. The Mutter Museum, housed at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, is a collection of medical specimens of the sort you will see nowhere else in the United States. You feel an alternation of fear and exaltation at all the ways that the human body can be transformed. In one corner of the museum was the skeleton of a man named Harry Eastlack, who asked that his body be donated to science so that his disorder might someday be understood.

Looking at his skeleton, I wondered how on Earth something like this could happen, and what on Earth it was like to experience something like this. The result is the longest feature I’ve written in some time, which appears in the June issue of the Atlantic. You can read it here.

Originally published May 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

My “Matter” column this week at the New York Times is a biography of the element chlorine. You may know it from roles in such classics as The Swimming Pool or Table Salt. But chlorine has had a long, weird history on Earth. Recent studies suggest that chlorine levels were ten times higher on our planet when it formed. If it still had that much chlorine today, we probably never would have existed. Check out my column for the full story.

Originally published May 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

Last week I wrote in my “Matter” column at the New York Times about how wolves became dogs. I described two new studies on the genetic transformation that produced our canine pets, starting about 32,000 years ago. The scientists who did the research discovered that certain genes in the dog genome have experienced strong natural selection.

Some of those evolving genes are especially intriguing, because they’re known to be important in the brain. One of these genes, for example, makes a protein that’s involved in controlling the level of a neurotransmitter called serotonin. Serotonin influences behaviors like aggression–not just in dogs, but in humans. And in humans, that same gene has experienced strong natural selection, too. For humans and dogs, alike, a key step in our recent evolution may have involved becoming more sociable.

Continue reading “Another Link Between Dog Brains And Our Brains” →

Leave a bagel on the counter for a few days, and you’ll probably notice purple splotches growing over it. At some point a mold spore wafted across the kitchen, landed on the bagel, and started to eat your food. Molds are a kind of fungus–just like toadstools, brewer’s yeast, and death cap mushrooms. They don’t just nosh on bagels. Fungi exist on all continents, and have been thriving for many hundreds of millions of years. Some break down the remains of animals and plants in the soil. Some provide nutrients to trees and crops through their roots, in exchange for a supply of carbon the plants make with sunlight. While fungi have evolved different shapes and sizes, they are all alike in some fundamental ways. When it comes to eating, for example, they are like inside-out animals. We animals swallow food and then break it down with enzymes. Fungi break their food down first by releasing enzymes, and then they absorb it.

Continue reading “Getting To Know Your Inner Mushroom” →

With deadly new viruses emerging these days in Saudi Arabia and China, it can be hard to imagine that viruses can be good for anything. It’s easy to forget that we are home to trillions–perhaps quadrillions–of viruses on our healthiest days. And, according to a team of California scientists, those viruses are our symbiotic partners, creating a second immune system. These viruses serve as a defensive front-line, keeping bacteria from invading our gut lining and causing deadly infections.

The viruses in question are far less familiar than, say, influenza viruses or Ebola viruses. They are known as bacteriophages, which means “eater of bacteria.” And yet bacteriophages (or phages for short) are vastly more common than viruses that infect humans. They’re more common than all the viruses that infect every animal on Earth. The reason is simple arithmetic: there are far more hosts for phages to multiply in than there are for viruses that infect our own cells. They’re in the ground, in the oceans, under ice, and in the air. By some estimates, there are 10³¹ phages on Earth. That makes phages the most abundant life form, period.

Continue reading “Meet Your New Symbionts: Trillions of Viruses” →