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.
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.”
Continue reading “#ArsenicLife Goes Longform, And History Gets Squished”
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…
Continue reading “Celluloid Science: October 20 at the New York Academy of Sciences”
WIRED, September 27, 2011
If some twisted genius vaporized all 10 trillion cells in your body — along with the hair, the fingernails, and other tissue they create — it would not leave empty space behind. A body-shaped cloud made of bacteria, viruses, and other former stowaways would hover briefly in the air. The cloud would outline your skin, delineate your lungs, trace your digestive tract. You might be gone for good, but your shadow biosphere would remain.
We got our first glimpse of these tiny tenants — now known collectively as the microbiome — in the late 17th century, when a Dutch lens grinder named Anton van Leeuwenhoek noticed a layer of white scum between his teeth.
I’m thrilled to have a piece of mine in this year’s edition of Best of American Science Writing. The book, edited by Rebecca Skloot and her father Floyd, is officially published on Tuesday, 9/27, but you can order it now on Amazon. My semi-skeptical take on the Singularity is in there, as is lots of excellent stuff–including fellow Discover blogger Ed Yong’s tale of sushi genes in Japanese gut bugs. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the first time a blog post has made it into this series. So congratulations to Ed Yong for giving the old blogs-versus-journalism critics another reason to pull their hair out.
Originally published September 23, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.