When I’ve traveled abroad, I’ve gotten my share of jabs for hepatitis and other diseases. But for malaria, the best I could hope for was to take malaria-blocking drugs like Lariam, which gave me weird dreams at night and made me feel as if someone was tugging my hair all day.

For people who live in countries with malaria, these prophylactic drugs just aren’t practical. Given that 800,000 people a year die of malaria, why don’t we have a good vaccine for it? It’s not for lack of trying–in fact, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the first attempts to make a malaria vaccine.

To understand this epic fail, I talked on my latest podcast with Irwin Sherman, a malaria expert and author of The Elusive Malaria Vaccine: Miracle or Mirage?.

Check it out.

Originally published May 7, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

“Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?”

—Thomas Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature (1863)

Originally published May 5, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Around 1870, a tiny Chinese insect turned up in farm fields around the city of San Jose, California. The creature would inject a syringe-like mouthpart into a plant and suck up the juices. It grew a plate-like shield that covered its entire body, out from which new insects would eventually emerge. The San Jose scale, as the insect came to be known, spread quickly through the United States and Canada, leaving ravaged orchards in its path. “There is perhaps no insect capable of causing greater damage to fruit interests in the United States, or perhaps the world, than the San Jose scale,” one entomologist declared.

Continue reading “How To Make A Superweed” →

In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds got annoyed. He had bought a personal computer to use at home, but he couldn’t find an operating system for it that was as robust as Unix, the system he used on the computers at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote one. He posted it online, free for anyone to download. But he required that anyone who figured out a way to make it better would have share the improvement with everyone else who used the system. Torvalds would later tell Wired that his motives were not noble. “I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work,” he said. “I wanted help.”

Continue reading “Linux Versus E. coli” →