Category: Blog
[This is my second post of Sex Week]
In the sexual universe, all sorts of things can feel good, even if we humans have a hard time imagining how they can bring any pleasure. Electricity, for example, may be nothing for us beyond a painful shock. But for some fishes, it is the essence of desire.
If yeast could sing, it might sound something like this.
This single-celled fungus–for which we should give thanks for bread, beer, and wine–can reproduce in several ways. Most of the time, it produces buds that eventually split off as free-living cells of their own. Its daughters are identical to itself, carrying the same two sets of chromosomes. Sometimes, however, life get rough for yeast, and they respond by making spores, each with only one set of chromosomes. Later, when times get better, the spores can germinate. In some cases the yeast cells that emerge just grow and divide. But they can also have sex. One yeast cell merges with another one, combining their DNA to produce a new yeast cell with two sets of chromosomes.
Continue reading “Gonna Have A Fungal Good Time [With Apologies to James Brown]”
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated viruses do it. And for some reason my stack of interesting scientific papers is particularly heavy at the moment with research on the evolution of sex. So let’s not be shy. All this week, I will blog about sex.
[Image: mating sand wasps, Alex Wild]
Originally published July 26, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
It’s terrifying to think that we’re weeks away from the fall semester, but so it seems. I will once more be teaching an upper-level seminar at Yale called “Writing About Science and the Environment.” Last year’s class was a wonderful experience, and I’m hoping to apply some of the lessons I learned about teaching to this fall’s edition.
I’ve just uploaded my new and improved syllabus to the Yale web site. So if you are at Yale (undergraduate or graduate), check it out at the university course information page (search for EVST 215) and please consider applying.
And if you’re not interested, please pass on this information to anyone you think might be.
And finally, if anyone has any questions about the class, don’t hesitate to email me.
Originally published July 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
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).