Scientists have known for decades that the genomes of animals can sometimes harbor DNA from the viruses that have infected them. When I first learned of this fact some years ago, it blew my mind. The notion that any animal could be a little bit viral blurred nature’s boundaries.
Continue reading “Your inner viruses: the trickle becomes the flood”
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.
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.
Continue reading “Evolution and the citizen: Your thoughts?”
A lovely piece from Robert Sapolsky, one of those scientists who gives us science-writers night terrors that we’ll be out of a job soon. It takes a while for Sapolsky to get to the gist, but it’s a gist worth waiting for: how we think in metaphor. So is poetry’s greatest strength the result of the social evolution of primates? Check it out.
Originally published November 15, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Discover, November 15, 2010
Pop quiz: What is 357 times 289? No pencils allowed. No calculators. Just use your brain.
Got an answer yet? Got it now? How about now? Chances are you still don’t. As you solved the problem one step at a time, you lost track of the numbers. Maybe you tried to start over, lost track again, and eventually gave up in frustration before you could discover that the answer was 103,173. I used a calculator to get that, I confess.
Our mutual failure is absurd. The brain is, in the words of neuroscientist Floyd Bloom, “the most complex structure that exists in the universe.”
Continue reading “The “Router” in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing”