Over the past week or so, I’ve been playing around with Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter. You can see my posts here.
Whenever a new social media system rolls out, I give it a test-drive. Sometimes I end up in a ditch. Here is my MySpace page, last updated three years ago and now lingering on like a time capsule.
In March I wrote about two studies that raised the tantalizing possibility that the tree of life, which till now has appeared to have three main branches, turns out to have a fourth.
Some of the evidence for the fourth branch (or “domain,” as taxonomists would call it) came from a newly discovered and very strange group of viruses. They’re known as giant viruses, because they’re about a hundred times bigger than typical viruses and can have over a thousand genes. If there was indeed a fourth domain , it meant that giant viruses were part of one of the oldest lineages on Earth. By studying them we might learn about the earliest stages in life’s evolution.
Thanks to everyone who has been taking my extra books off my hands in advance of a summer of house-gutting. If you’ve been holding out, or if you’ve been thinking about getting another book, your moment has come. Apparently, some brain-infecting parasite has taken such a grievous toll on my Economic Cortex that I now find myself offering you this final, ridiculous sale to end all sales. All the remaining autographed hardback books in my Amazon store are now ten dollars. All autographed paperback books are five dollars.
Continue reading “The Final Stage of Madness: The Ultimate Autographed Book Clearance Sale”
Lucas Brouwers, one of the new bloggers at Scientific American’s snazzy new blog network, takes a look at an intriguing paper (free pdf). The authors of the paper in examined many different strains of E. coli and come to a remarkable conclusion: they’ve been splitting apart so far that they may soon no longer be a single species. Check it out. (And, if you have a lot of time to spare, check out the rest of Scientific American’s fine line-up of bloggers.)
Originally published July 8, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Nieman Storyboard, July 7, 2011
When the Mississippi River recently surged down through the middle of the country, a lot of people I follow on Twitter took the opportunity to point to John McPhee’s marvelous 1987 article “Atchafalaya.”I took their advice and revisited the piece.
Continue reading ““Why’s this so good?” No. 2: McPhee takes on the Mississippi”