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” →

New Scientist physical science new editor Victoria Jaggard writes, “I was excited to see the return of the science ink emporium. It’s encouraged me to finally share a piece I had done about a year ago. Basically, until high school I was completely in love with only music and literature, while my classes made science seem deadly dull. Then my English teacher introduced me to science writing, and that changed everything. Science as presented in magazines like Discover and Scientific American (and of course National Geographic) was messy and heroic and as full of joy and heartbreak as any great novel, and the story-telling was just as engaging. That got me so excited about science that I started noticing how it also inspired photography, sculpture, music, theater … even fashion. Now I’m a complete space geek, which is something I never would have predicted at 17, and a huge supporter of better science communication through the arts. I chose this astrolabe –an astronomy tool from 17th-century India, used in a 21st-century study of brass metallurgy–to remind me that science and beauty have gone hand-in-hand for millennia.”

You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here and in Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

Originally published January 13, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.