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” →

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.

On Monday, I’ll be speaking at a master’s tea at Morse College at Yale at 4 pm about outbreaks–real and fictionalized, viral and bacterial. It’s free and open to the public.

On Tuesday, I’ll be participating in Story Collider, a marvelous series of performances in which people tell stories about science. I am a bit nervous about this one for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I go on stage after Bora Zivkovic. I’ve sat in Bora’s car, listening to his stories, which he tells with one hand on the wheel and the other sweeping around in operatic gestures. I know what I’m up against.

The fun starts at 8 pm in Brooklyn. Details are here.

Originally published September 23, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.