I’ve contributed my first article to Technology Review–a short profile of Tim Lu of MIT, one of TR’s 35 innovators under 35. Lu is engineering viruses to attack biofilms–not just the ones that make us sick, but the ones that gum up factories and HVAC systems. Elegant and practical at the same time. Congratulations to all the winners!
Originally published August 27, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Conservation Magazine, August 27, 2010
Win-win solutions can be hard to come by. But if Cornell University soil scientist Johannes Lehmann is right, there may be a way to lower our emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, save millions of people’s lives, and significantly boost the productivity of the world’s farms—all at the same time. And, most remarkably, his strategy is based on a deceptively simple technology invented 8,000 years ago.
Lehmann’s idea starts with organic leftovers that people normally burn or leave to rot—forest brush, corn husks, nutshells, and even chicken manure. When this stuff decays or goes up in smoke, it releases vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere.
MIT Technology Review, August 25, 2010
At Harvard Medical School, many of Timothy Lu’s patients were being attacked by carpets of microbial goo. They had “really bad infections,” Lu says. “Patients with cystic fibrosis, people getting infections in their catheters. All caused by biofilms.”
If you’re looking for a gang of vicious killers, look no further than the Apicomplexans. These single-celled protozoans cause death and destruction across the animal kingdom. They infect everything from butterflies to people. Their diseases include Texas Cattle Fever, toxoplasmosis, and the scourge that makes Plasmodium the baddest Apicomplexan of them all, malaria. Continue reading “Malaria, Sea Grapes, and Kidney Stones: A Tale of Parasites Lost”
I’ve got two podcasts at Meet the Scientist to tell you about.
The first is a conversation with Nancy Moran, a Yale biologist who studies microbes that become essential to the survival of their hosts. In some cases, these symbionts lose just about all their DNA except for the genes that they use to be useful to their host–leading to the smallest genomes in nature.
The second is a conversation with Susan Golden of UCSD on the subject of time. We humans have a body clock, of course, but so do some bacteria. Why does a microbe need to know the time of day, when its lifespan can be far shorter? That would be like our body clock running a cycle of 1,000 years. Listen to find out.
Originally published August 19, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.