This week the FDA announced that they were approving a new kin

Originally published January 17, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

d of flu vaccine. Nestled in the articles was an odd fact: unlike traditional flu vaccines, the new kind, called Flublok, is produced by the cells of insects.

This is the kind of detail that you might skim over without giving it a thought. If you did pause to ponder, you might be puzzled: how could insects possibly make a vaccine against viruses that infect humans? The answer may surprise you. To make vaccines, scientists are tapping into a battle between viruses and insects that’s raging in forests and fields and backyards all around us. It’s an important lesson in how to find new ideas in biotechnology: first, leave biologists free to explore the weirdest corners of nature they can find.

Continue reading “Viruses That Make Zombies and Vaccines” →

The soot we loft into the sky is a remarkably mysterious player in the climate game. At Yale Environment 360, I report on the most comprehensive study yet of soot, which reveals that it’s trapping huge amounts of heat. Yet getting rid of all the soot we put in the atmosphere wouldn’t change the climate much. Check out my piece for the solution to that paradox.

Originally published January 17, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

About 100,000 people die each year in the United States from infections they pick up in hospitals. Even the best hospitals in the country are not exempt from this disaster, and it’s getting worse: the bacteria that are attacking patients are becoming frighteningly resistant to antibiotics. Some are becoming resistant to everything doctors can throw at them.

I recently went to Bethesda, Maryland, to visit doctors who struggled with one of these outbreaks at the NIH Clinical Center, one of the country’s premiere research hospitals. Most hospitals stay pretty quiet about their outbreaks, but the Clinical Center staff was far more transparent. They were willing to take me around the hospital as they described their struggles to stop the bacteria, called KPC, as it crept mysteriously from patient to patient and from ward to ward. Continue reading “Mutants: A Story About Tracking A Hospital Killer” →

Nikon has handed out awards in its second annual Small World In Motion competition–a contest for the best video of the world we can’t see with our naked eye.

Here are a few of my favorites…

A tiny animal called a rotifer lives inside a tube attached to a plant. It beats hairs called cilia to pump food into the tube, where it can be ground up by the rotifer’s jaw-like structures.

Continue reading “The Hidden World Moves” →

It’s not easy to push the explosive terror of norovirus out of the public square. It takes another virus that’s even more worrying and even more adept at spreading suffering around the world.

I speak, of course, of influenza. Continue reading “Influenza: Our Incompetent Enemy” →