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”
Wired, January 17, 2013
On September 19, 2011, Evan Snitkin sat staring at a computer monitor, its screen cluttered with Perl script and row after row of 0s sprinkled with the occasional 1. To Snitkin, a bioinformatician at the National Institutes of Health, it read like a medical thriller. In this raw genetic-sequencing data, he could see the hidden history of a deadly outbreak that was raging just a few hundred yards from where he sat.
Continue reading “How Scientists Stalked a Lethal Superbug—With the Killer’s Own DNA”
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.
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”