Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

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Deep Water: A Pretty Good TED Ebook (Really!) About Climate Change

Posted on by Carl Zimmer

This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise. By Daniel Grossman. Published by TED Books, 2012.

Guest reviewed by John Dupuis

August 15, 2012

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Good Scientist! You Get a Badge.

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Slate, August 14, 2012

Link

As a young biologist, Elizabeth Iorns did what all young biologists do: She looked around for something interesting to investigate. Having earned a Ph.D. in cancer biology in 2007, she was intrigued by a paper that appeared the following year in Nature. Biologists at the University of California-Berkeley linked a gene called SATB1 to cancer. They found that it becomes unusually active in cancer cells and that switching it on in ordinary cells made them cancerous. The flipside proved true, too: Shutting down SATB1 in cancer cells returned them to normal. The results raised the exciting possibility that SATB1 could open up a cure for cancer. So Iorns decided to build on the research.

There was just one problem. As her first step, Iorns tried replicate the original study. She couldn’t. Boosting SATB1 didn’t make cells cancerous, and shutting it down didn’t make the cancer cells normal again.

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A Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for science? My new piece in Slate

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Like a number of other science writers, I’ve become increasingly interested (and concerned) about science’s ability to correct itself. (See my recent pieces about arsenic life, de-discovery, and dysfunctional science.) So I was intrigued by a new project launching today to encourage scientists to embrace the spirit of replication. I write about it at Slate. Check it out.

Originally published August 14, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

Interplanetary Cuisine

Posted on by Carl Zimmer

This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

Space Nutrition. By Scott M. Smith, Janis Davis-Street, Lisa Neasbitt, and Sara R. Zwart. Published by NASA Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

August 14, 2012

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