Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime?

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The New York Times, October 3, 2011

Link

Most of the aliens that come out of Hollywood don’t really look alien at all. They may have pizza-size eyes or roachlike antennae, but their oddities are draped on a familiar humanoid frame.

If you want to find life forms that truly seem otherworldly, your local forest is a much better place than your local cineplex. It is home to creatures that are immensely old, fundamentally bizarre and capable of startlingly sophisticated behavior. They are the slime molds.

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Tom Clynes on arsenic life

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Yesterday I wrote about the arsenic life saga, prompted by a long retrospective feature by Tom Clynes in Popular Science. While I recommend the piece, I expressed reservations because it passed along the “scientists besieged by bloggers” spin on the events, when the actual history doesn’t support that.

Clynes (whom I’ve never met) emailed me in the evening with this comments, which he allowed me to share:

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My kind of centerfold

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

The folks at Wired recently asked me to put together a guide to the human ecosystem. You can get it in the October issue as a centerfold–the kind of centerfold that shows someone who took off the clothes, and then took off the skin. Bugs in your eyes, in your ears, in your gut, influencing your mind and health–they’re all there. Check it out.

Originally published September 30, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

#ArsenicLife Goes Longform, And History Gets Squished

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

If you haven’t been tracking the arsenic life saga closely over the past ten months, check out Tom Clynes’s big feature at Popular Science. It focuses on the travails of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author on the paper, who has gone from the Olympian heights of TED talks to getting “evicted” from the lab where she’s worked for the past couple years. (Her word.)

For those of us who’ve been tracking the story for a while, that last fact popped out. Wolfe-Simon had been working in the lab of her co-author Ronald Oremland, but that’s now over. Let’s recall that her senior colleagues dubbed the intriguing microbe she studied GFAJ-1, for “Get Felicia A Job.”

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Celluloid Science: October 20 at the New York Academy of Sciences

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Let’s just pretend for a moment that this theater is showing a thrilling movie about Cambrian fossils, shall we? And to further that dream, join me in October for “Celluloid Science,” a talk about science and the movies at the New York Academy of Sciences. It’s part of the NYAS “Science & The City” series.

Here are the details from the event web site…

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