Well, Jason Bond fared pretty well on the Colbert Report, as Colbert picked a spider to be named after him. (Actually, the species name was already in the bag–or rather, in press.)
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Spida of Love – Jason Bond | ||||
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Prospect Magazine picks Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life as a a book to pack for your summer vacation:
“Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm: E Coli and the New Science of Life (Pantheon Books) delivers what a science book should; it reveals the new and re-enchants the old. By looking at the process common to all life through the prism of an organism with no public persona to distract us–the bacterium Escherichia coli, uncomplaining workhorse of ten thousand laboratories, unobserved and mostly benign passenger in the guts of us all–he is able to draw out all sorts of implications form one of the 20th century’s great discoveries.
This should be interesting. In the June issue of Scientific American, I wrote an article called “What Is A Species?” I wrote about the challenges scientists face in drawing a line between species, especially when they have only recently diverged from a common ancestor and are still interbreeding. One of the best examples of how scientists tackle this challenge came out of a conversation I had with Jason Bond, an East Carolina University biologist who studies trapdoor-building spiders. In the article I explained how he studies the evolutionary history of the spiders, their adaptation to ecolical niches, and the flow of genes from one population to another. Combining these lines of evidence, he then proposes new species.
Continue reading “Will Colbert Make The World’s First Species Delimitation Joke Tonight?”
An immunologist who requests anonymity writes:
“Nearly every faculty member I meet seems to become instantly curious about my tattoo (attached). I have had it for almost 2 years now. My wife was simply shocked when I returned home after the first sitting. Yes, it took n=3 sittings of ~6 hours each.
Personally, it represents a collection of ideas, experiences, and memories that I chose to mark myself with. I wanted to make a difference with my scientific training as a viral immunologist, so I left my “ivory tower” postdoc position to do translational research at USAMRIID.
Martijn ter Haar, a person from the Netherlands I’ve never met, clearly knows what sort of movies I like to watch. The ones with big parasitic worms crawling around inside a sealed box of fish at the supermarket. Warning: Safe for work, not safe for lunch.
This bad boy is Anisakis, a worm that would much rather be off in the sea than in your gut. Its eggs float through alll the world’s oceans until they’re scarfed up by a crustacean, inside of which they mature into a new larval stage. Their next host is the fish that eats the crustacean–they escape from its gut and drill into its muscle. Finally, the fish is eaten by a dolphin or a seal, whereupon the worm becomes an adult and lives harmlessly and happily, churning out eggs that the predators kindly squirt out with their poop. In other words, the good life.