In my new Dissection column over at Wired, I take a look at a remarkable new experiment on E. coli. Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe’s activity and found that it generally just kept humming along.

One thing worth adding…in an accompanying commentary, Matthew Bennett and Jeff Hasty at UCSD write,

This conclusion also flies in the face of the popular misconception among opponents of the evolutionary theory, who believe that the genetic code is irreducibly complex. 

Continue reading “Is There Nothing E. coli Cannot Do? Part Two of a Continuing Series” →

Three weeks away from the publication of Microcosm, and another kind review has come out, this time from Library Journal:

“To display a broad swath of the people, scientific processes, and discoveries involved in biology, science writer Zimmer (Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain-and How It Changed the World) describes a common, luxuriantly growing, usually benign gut bacterium, Escherichia coli, or E. coli. Easily grown in petri dishes, the species has alter egos that can kill its hosts, making the organism a useful laboratory model to explore the basis of heredity.

Continue reading “Library Journal Weighs In” →

Abraham writes: “My fascination with Tesla started in elementary school, when my science teacher compared Tesla and Edison. I decided to pay my tribute to the wizard with a patent drawing on an electric magnetic motor, submitted by Tesla in the late 1800’s.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published April 14, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

A biochemist writes:

“Here is a picture of my science tattoo, which is a stylized structure of glycolipid A, the preformed glycolipid membrane anchor precursor I discovered as a graduate student some 20 years ago. At that time, membrane proteins that were anchored via glycolipids, rather than transmembrane protein domains, had just been found and this was the first precursor to be reported. The structure is simplified but basically correct, although considerable artistic license has been taken with bond lengths and angles.”

Continue reading “One Way to Remember Your Discovery” →

I’m heading to Colorado to give a talk at the University of Denver tomorrow. The subject of the talk is my book Soul Made Flesh, about the birth of neurology in the 1600s (see PZ Myer’s kind review here). I’ll also be talking about the experience of writing books about science. Of course, the first thing I’ll have to confess is that most of the experience of writing Soul Made Flesh–going to libraries, paging through physical books–is already fairly obsolete.

If you live around Denver and are free at 12:30 pm Tuesday, come by. Here are the details. 

Originally published April 14, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.