Having written a book about E. coli has made me a keen aficionado of E. coli ties and E. coli plush toys. But a glass sculpture of E. coli? Now that’s classy.
This beautiful piece of sculpture is the work of the artist Luke Jerram. Check out his web site for his entire Glass Microbiology project. Swine flu never looked so good.
(Hat tip to Stan Carey)
Originally published September 3, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Quick shake of the head, rub of the eyes, and back to some science.
In today’s New York Times, please check out my article about the quest for fossilized color. Birds without color would be like Van Goghs without the paint, and yet for 150 year paleontologists have had to resign themselves to drab fossils of birds, offering little idea of what the birds actually looked like. That’s now changed. It turns out that the microscopic bags of pigment that give feathers color (not to mention squid ink color too) are incredibly tough. Scientists have found them in fossilized feathers, and they’ve pretty conclusively demonstrated that these things are not feather-feeding bacteria, despite a superficial similarity. What’s more, the scientists can now even use the pattern of the bags (a k a the melanosomes) to figure out some things about the color of a 47-million-year-old ex-parrot extinct bird. It had the kind of iridescence you might see on a grackle or a brown-headed cowbird.
Two years ago I was invited me to participate in a weird but cool experiment. The author Robert Wright had set up an online talk show of sorts called Bloggingheads. Two people with something interesting to say–economists, political scientists, human rights workers, seasoned journalists, and others–would pick a topic. They would talk on the phone while filming themselves and then upload the recordings. Others could then watch them hold forth.
I loved the inventiveness of the format. I loved how a conversation could be embedded in any other site. I loved the way people would just talk for an hour rather than squeeze their points down to meaningless sound bites. And so even though it was just a volunteer gig, I dove in. It was took a while for me to get used to the medium–staring into the glass eye of a camera and pretending it was a human head just doesn’t come naturally to me. And crackly cell phone connections didn’t help. But on the best of occasions it was fun. It let me expand what I used to do only on the printed page. I had interesting talks with all sorts of interesting people, such as Craig Venter, Neil Shubin, and my brother.
But now my experiment’s over. This post is an explanation of why, and how this turn of events has gotten me thinking about the future of science in new media.
Continue reading “Bloggingheads and the Old Challenges of New Tools”
The New York Times, August 31, 2009
Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacock’s neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils. Several feather fossils have been unearthed over the years, but they have always been assumed to be colorless vestiges.
Now a team of scientists has discovered color-producing molecules that have survived for 47 million years in the fossil of a feather. By analyzing those molecules, the researchers have shown that they would have given a bird the kind of dark, iridescent sheen found on starlings and other living birds.
Continue reading “First Trace of Color Found in Fossil Bird Feathers”
The stork UPS man pitched a box through the front door this morning. Inside was an advance copy of my new book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. The paternal photographer in me took over, and now I have to show off my snaps. Above is a picture that I like for two reasons. One is the way it shows off Carl Buell’s lovely (and crowd-critiqued) cover. The other is the way it illustrates the book’s far-less-than-a-doorstop mass, which is all too typical for textbooks these days. In fact, the book’s smaller than Tino, our far-less-than-a-doorstop cat.