7,000 Miles Nonstop, and No Pretzels

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The New York Times, May 24, 2010

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In 1976, the biologist Robert E. Gill Jr. came to the southern coast of Alaska to survey the birds preparing for their migrations for the winter. One species in particular, wading birds called bar-tailed godwits, puzzled him deeply. They were too fat.

“They looked like flying softballs,” said Mr. Gill.

At the time, scientists knew that bar-tailed godwits spend their winters in places like New Zealand and Australia. To get there, most researchers assumed, the birds took a series of flights down through Asia, stopping along the way to rest and eat. After all, they were land birds, not sea birds that could dive for food in the ocean.

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Yammerings: San Diego, New York, and TV

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

I’ve got some public face time coming up:

Tuesday, May 25, 5:30 pm: In San Diego, I’ll be talking at the American Society for Microbiology. I was asked to speak at the President’s Forum, “Tell the Story of Science.” My own talk is, “Newspapers, Blogs, And Other Vectors: Infecting Minds With Science In the Age of New Media.”

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Synthetic Genome+Natural Cell=New Life?

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He’s synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide. It’s hard to say whether this is “life from scratch,” because the boundary between such a thing and ordinary life (and non-life) is actually blurry. For example, you could say that this is still a nature hybrid, because its DNA is based on the sequence of an existing species of bacteria. If Venter made up a sequence from scratch, maybe we’d have crossed to a new terrain.

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