We typically look at rubies and other gems as treasure, bling, or signs of matrimony. But they are also historians, telling us about what the Earth was like hundreds of millions of years ago. In today’s Matter column in the New York Times, I talk to geologists who treat jewels as archives of planetary history. Check it out.
Originally published June 13, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, June 13, 2013
A jewelry store is an archive of the Earth. Every gem fixed to every ring or necklace was forged deep inside our planet, according to its own recipe of elements, temperature and pressure.
But it has taken a while for geologists to decode the cookbook for gems. Jade, for example, puzzled geologists for decades. “For a long time people looked at this crazy rock, and it didn’t make any sense,” said George Harlow, a geologist at the American Museum of Natural History. But thanks to the research of Dr. Harlow and other geologists, jade now has a back story: It formed in dying oceans.
Continue reading “In Glittering Gems, Reading Earth’s Story”
We have a habit of seeing nature in snapshots. We marvel at the adaptation of a species–see Ed Yong today on the maneuverability of cheetahs, for example–and don’t give much though about how it came to be. These snapshots can become downright confusing when we survey the diversity of many different species. Each species may have a radically different solution to the same problem. If one solution is so impressive, how could another one evolve, too?
The cure for this puzzlement is to get away from the snapshots. A species is a blurry, speckled thing. It’s made up of populations spread across a range, and each population is made up of many individuals, each with its own somewhat distinct set of genes. Those genes flow around the range, from individual to individual, mixed into new combinations, some spreading far and wide, some vanishing after a generation.
Continue reading “Poison, Camouflage, and the Rainbow of Evolution”
I’m no fan of the cold, so it’s remarkable to me that there are so many species that can thrive at temperatures that would kill me from hypothermia. At Nova Next, I’ve written a feature about these so-called psychrophiles. I take a look at the biochemical secrets to survival at sub-zero temperatures, what psychrophiles can tell us about life on other chilly planets, and how biotechnology might harness their remarkable proteins for all sorts of applications. Check it out.
Originally published June 11, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
Nova Next, June 11, 2013
A big part of Ricardo Cavicchioli’s job as a biologist is finding new species. And Cavicchioli, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has had particular good fortune at a place called Organic Lake, in the Vestfold Hills. “We discovered things we were never even looking for,” Cavicchioli says.
If you actually tagged along with Cavicchioli on one of his trips to Organic Lake, however, you might be deeply skeptical that this was a place where anything could live. The Vestfold Hills are not a rolling tropical landscape. They are located in East Antarctica. Organic Lake gets as cold as -13˚ C. The only reason its depths don’t turn to ice is thanks to its staggering concentration of salt.
Continue reading “Comfortable in the Cold: Life Below Freezing in an Antarctic Lake”