Wired, April 3, 2014
Antibiotics save lives, but they also wipe out a lot of beneficial organisms that our bodies rely on, says Martin Blaser.
We’re in the midst of an extinction crisis, and it doesn’t involve Siberian tigers. Microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University School of Medicine says that many species of germs are disappearing from our bodies—and that’s a problem.
Continue reading “Antibiotics Have Turned Our Bodies From Gardens Into Battlefields”
“In Moby-Dick, the cabin-boy Pip falls out of the ship and sinks deep in the ocean (emphasis mine):
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
I’ll be taking the week off from blogging. Let me leave you with an hour-long interview on public radio in Charlotte, NC, which was recorded on Friday when I was in town to give a lecture for the North Carolina State Science Festival. We ranged over a lot of material, from de-extinctions to science literacy to personalized medicine and more. See you next week! Continue reading “From Microbiomes to Neanderthals”
The photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling the world to take pictures of the oldest living organisms on our planet. She described her journey in this TED talk, and now, at last, she’s created a gorgeous new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Rachel asked if I would write an introduction to the book. After contemplating her photographs and thinking about what these strange Methuselahs mean for us and for science, here’s what I wrote: Continue reading “The Oldest Living Things On Earth”
National Geographic, March 28, 2014
It is easy to feel sorry for the gastrotrich. This invertebrate animal, the size of a poppy seed and the shape of a bowling pin, swarms by the millions in rivers and lakes. After it hatches, it takes only three days to develop a complicated body, complete with a mouth, a gut, sensory organs, and a brain. Having reached maturity in just seventy-two hours, the gastrotrich starts laying eggs. And after a few more days, it becomes enfeebled and dies of old age.
To squeeze a whole life into a week seems like one of nature’s more cruel tricks. But that’s only because we are accustomed to measure our lives in decades.