A Man From Whom Viruses Can’t Hide

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The New York Times, November 22, 2010

Link

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin was spending the afternoon prowling his empire of viruses. The Center for Infection and Immunity, which he directs, occupies three floors of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Rather than wait for the elevator, Dr. Lipkin ran up and down the back stairs to move from floor to floor, leaning into the doorways of labs and glass-walled offices to get updates from a platoon of scientists.

Gustavo Palacios was sequencing the genes from a new strain of Ebola virus found in a bat in Spain–a worrisome development, since the fatal virus has almost never been found outside Africa.

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The traffic jam in your head (now with Slashdot goodness)

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

My new brain column for Discover is online, and it’s about one of the weirder failings of our mind: the way our thoughts can get stuck in a traffic jam. When we are required to do two things in quick succession–like answer a cell phone and hit the brakes–our brains freeze up for an instant. Researchers have known about this so-called psychological refractory period for decades, but they’re still trying to figure out how, and why, it happens. As I explain in my column, this inner weakness may actually reveal an inner strength. Check it out. (And thanks to Slashdot for the tsunami of link love.)

Originally published November 20, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Is there nothing E. coli cannot do? The Sudoku edition

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Every now and then I take a moment at the Loom to marvel anew at the sophistication of a certain microbe. Today, I direct your attention to a report in New Scientist on E. coli that has been engineered to solve Sudoku puzzles. Frank Swain, the author, makes a good point: if E. coli is allowed to spread out the task among millions of individual microbes, it can tackle bigger problems. Let’s just hope that all the E. coli in our guts don’t figure this out on their own…

Originally published November 4, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Evolution and the citizen: Your thoughts?

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

I’m preparing for my first trip to New Orleans. The occasion is the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America. Steven Austad, a University of Texas biologist, asked me to come give a talk in a session he’s organized next Monday. Austad studies the evolution of aging in the hopes of finding ways of slowing the aging process. (I wrote about him in 2007 in the sadly defunct Best Life magazine–read the article here or here.) In the face of an anti-evolution education bill passed by the Louisiana legislature, Austad decided to use his trip to the state next week to organize a session on the important of a good evolution education.

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