Today , a company called Ion Torrent announced they were going to start selling a DNA-sequencing machine that can sequence an entire human genome for $1,000. It’s just the latest milestone in the long-term crash in the cost of gene-reading. There are lots of benefits that will flow from this ongoing transformation. For one thing, as I wrote in 2010 in the New York Times, it’s getting easier to identify new viruses that could turn to be the next HIV or SARS.
Category: Blog
This is a story of about how the parts of a puzzle locked into place 800 million years ago. The puzzle is an ion pump that you can find in any mushroom, mold, or yeast. I’ve reproduced a picture of it here.
Fungus cells, like our own cells, have lots of little pouches inside of them for carrying out special kinds of chemical reactions. In order for those reactions to work, there have to be a lot of positively-charged protons inside the pouches. To get those protons into the pouches, ion pumps like this one force them through membranes.
Continue reading “Resurrecting Evolution to Solve an 800-Million-Year-Old Puzzle”
1. Good morning. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal features Science Ink in their Visualizer Column. I stopped by their offices on Friday and recorded an interview with WSJ editor Gary Rosen, which I’ve embedded below.
Continue reading “The Wall Street Journal ogles tattoos, and more #scienceink news”
Today the Huffington Post is launching a new science “channel,” overseen by a full-time science editor. This should be interesting.
The Huffington Post is one of the most popular places for getting news and opinion, attracting well over 30 million views a month. It started out mainly as a blogging network, and then added on a lot of aggregation of news stories, supplemented by slide shows. More recently, they’ve been hiring full-time reporters and editors on subjects like politics and economics.
Thanks to Booklist for a late Xmas present: they put A Planet of Viruses on their Editor’s Choice 2011 list!
The book is currently available in hardback and ebook; the paperback will come out in May.
Originally published January 4, 2012. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.