How Microbes Defend and Define Us

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The New York Times, July 12, 2010

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Dr. Alexander Khoruts had run out of options.

In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said.

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The Blog Days of Summer

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Between scrambling to finish some big projects and avoiding summer brain-fry, I haven’t been doing much science blogging recently. And now I’ll be taking a few days away from blogging altogether. It’s not a blackout at the Loom, though; just a brown-out. I’m going to schedule some old posts I’m fond of, as well as a backlog of science tattoos. Later this month I’ll be rested, refreshed, and ready to blog anew.

[Image: Weegee/Amber Online]

Originally published July 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Facebook Is Not A Brain, And Other Failed Metaphors

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

It sounds cool to say maybe the Internet has turned us all into one giant superorganism, as Robert Wright does today in the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. But before we bandy about cool-sounding words, it’s necessary to think hard about what they mean–particularly, what they mean to the biologists who first developed them as concepts.

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Oh, Pepsi, What Hast Thou Wrought?

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

[Updated! See bottom of post.]

As I continue to bake today, yearning for just a few minutes in Senator Inhofe’s igloo , I’ve been keeping tabs on a saddening train wreck over at my old haunt, Scienceblogs. Before I brought the Loom to Discover, I blogged at Scienceblogs, which was hosted by the folks behind the now-defunct (?) Seed Magazine. There was a lot I enjoyed about that time, and I still keep tabs on a number of excellent bloggers still at Scienceblogs. Except that, as of today, a lot of them are no longer there.

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