My latest book, Microcosm, is about what it means to be alive, as seen from the point of view of E. coli. So it was a jolt to the system to discover that the guy who basically wrote the book on E. coli has just reviewed it for the American Society for Microbiology’s journal, Microbe. Frederick Neidhardt of the University of Michigan is the editor-in-chief of Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology. I relied on this 2898-page tome a lot while I worked on Microcosm, lugging the two volumes off the shelf at the Yale med school library and dropping them with a crash on my table.
[Correction appended]
There’s been a wrinkle in the global warming fact-checking saga I’ve been following this week.
Just to recap–George Will wrote a column claiming that global warming’s a lot of hype. He made a number of misleading statements, including one that was rejected by the very scientists he claimed as his source.
Will stated, “According to the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
While recovering from an extracted wisdom tooth this morning, I cheered up when I saw that Talking Points Memo and other blogs have picked up my grousing about George Will’s error-laden global warming column in the Washington Post. When I first became aware of Will’s column on Monday, it seemed to me the perfect example of the general problem with treating op-ed pages as “opinion.” That is, if by opinion, you mean that someone doesn’t have to adhere to the facts. I could state that the Earth is 6000 years old, and no one would dare correct me, because it’s just my opinion.
Check out Phil Plait and me at Bloggingheads with our dueling headsets, talking about citizen science and Twittering fireballs. Which of us will complete your phone order first? The race is on.
Originally published February 21, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Behold the ribosome, one of life’s hideously tangled molecular masterpieces. You couldn’t live without it, and the same goes for all living things on Earth. It might seem impossible to reconstruct the evolution of such a complex thing that emerged over 3.5 billion years ago. But according to an intriguing new hypothesis, the ribosome’s evolution may turn out to be elegantly simple. You can read about it in my latest guest post on the Origins Blog.
Originally published February 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.