In my book Microcosm (which has just come out in paperback), I took great pleasure in all the things that something as tiny as E. coli can do. It can survive in frozen soils and stomach acid. It can can build intricate tails which it can then spin hundreds of times a second in order to swim. It can navigate away from the bad and towards the good. It can protect itself from overheating by making just enough protective proteins it needs, with thermostat-like precision. It can survive starvation by folding its DNA into a crystalline sandwich and powering down for months, even years in some cases. It can build microbial cities out of goo, and even commit suicide to help its fellow E. coli survive.

Continue reading “Microcosm Week: How E. coli Sees The Future” →

On today’s episode of Bloggingheads, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I talk about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, the new book he has co-authored with his co-blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum. We definitely have our differences, or different emphases, but I hope our argument ended up being enlightening, rather than demolishing.

Continue reading “Bloggingheads: Robot Superbowls, Oversized Electrons, and Other Thoughts With Chris Mooney” →

I have some hope for a happy coexistence between blogs about science and older forms of media. I don’t think blogs will ever supplant newspapers and magazines, nor I do I think they’re killing them like a parasite destroying its host. In fact, blogs may be able to act as a new kind of quality-control mechanism. I know that not all my colleagues on the old-media side of the divide are so optimistic. You’d be hard-pressed to find a snootier distillation of their scorn than something Independent science editor Steve Connor wrote recently:

Continue reading “Disappearing The Science News” →

Long after I’m dead, there will be stingrays swimming the Arafura Sea infested with tapeworms that bear my name.

There are about 1.8 million species with names, out of an estimated 8 to 9 million species in total. In 2007 alone, scientists named 18516 new species. Naming a species is actually the final step in a long, slow journey. It starts with the discovery of an organism that looks like it just might not belong to any known species. Scientists then search the scientific literature to see if it is indeed new to science. If it is, they inspect it in painstaking detail, observing all the information one might be able to use to identify another organism as belonging to the same species. This is not the sort of work a gene-sequencing robot can do for you on your lunch break. This is natural history, old school.

Continue reading “A Tapeworm To Call My Own” →

Last week, three teams of scientists published three massive studies in Nature on the genes behind schizophrenia. They scanned thousands of people to find variants of genes that tended to show up more in people with schizophrenia than in those without it. And they found a heap of genes. There are thousands of different variants that each may raise your risk of schizophrenia by a tiny amount.

Continue reading “Microcosm Week: Dreaming of a Complete Solution to Life” →