My Long Now lecture: Viral Time (slides and audio)

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

I just got back from San Francisco, where I had the privilege to speak at the remarkable Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, the head of the foundation, invites people to talk to the group about topics that stretch our conception of time over long scales. So I spoke about viruses and time–how they exist at scales ranging from minutes to eons. The Long Now folks have just posted the audio, which I’ve embedded below. I’ve also embedded the slides for my talk, too.

If I can win the battle against an army of deadlines this week, I’ll try to write out the entire talk as I did with “The Human Lake.” But I’ve learned not to make hard promises.

Audio:

Slides:

Viral Time: Carl Zimmer’s talk at the Long Now Foundation

View more presentations from cwzimmer

Originally published June 9, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

The Mind After Midnight: Here’s the video from the World Science Festival

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Last week I was thrilled to moderate a World Science Festival panel about the mysteries of sleep and dreams. The video is now up here. I’m also embedding it below (if WordPress plays nice with the code…). Be sure to watch till the end, when you can learn about snore-gasms.

I’ve actually written about Niels Rattenborg, one of the panelists before, in a piece for the New York Times. I also wrote about the researchers he’s now collaborating with, who put transmitters on birds that go on ultra-long migrations.

Watch live streaming video from worldsciencefestival  at livestream.com

Originally published June 8, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

The two faces of E. coli: my article in Newsweek and interview with the BBC

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

On Friday, as the E. coli outbreak gained horrific speed in Germany, Newsweek asked me to write about how this epidemic came to be. Scientists still have a lot to figure out about it, but some things are clear–in particular, that the bacteria have great scope for evolution into new deadly strains, thanks in part to the shuttling of viruses between them. (In my book Microcosm, I explain how this is true not just for E. coli, but for much of life.) My piece appears in the new issue of Newsweek, which you can read online here. (One late-breaking piece of news that didn’t make it in, by the way, is the finding yesterday that the new outbreak appears to have come from bean sprouts.)

While I was working on my Newsweek piece, a reporter for the BBC called me up for an article on the good side of E. coli. I explained how much of how we understand about life itself came out of research on this typically harmless bug, and that the biotechnology industry was build upon its biology. That piece came out over the weekend.Check it out.

[Image: glass microbe by Luke Jerram]

Originally published June 6, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

E. Coli: Rise of the Superbacteria

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Newsweek, June 5, 2011

Link

When Philip Tarr heard the first reports of a massive outbreak of E. coli in Europe recently, they had a sickeningly familiar ring. Tarr, a microbiologist at Washington University, is an expert on the strains of E. coli that have periodically wreaked havoc in the United States. In 2006, for example, E. coli on contaminated spinach infected 199 people in the United States, causing kidney failure in a number of cases. The European outbreak seemed to fit the pattern: people were infected with E. coli apparently after eating contaminated vegetables.

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