We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly’s wings. But a lot of nature’s intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker’s yeast that makes bread rise and beer ferment. At an audition for a David Attenborough documentary, a yeast cell guzzling away on sugar is bound to do a lousy job. (“Thanks, don’t call us; we’ll call you. Send in the King Cobra!”) But the intricacy of its metabolism is no less impressive. What’s more, scientists know how to manipulate yeast in ways they can’t with animals, and that power lets them set up experiments that yield clues to how that intricacy evolved.
Science writer Jessica Snyder Sachs has an interesting op-ed in today’s New York Times, explaining why you should get your flu shot and skip the chicken pox parties. It’s a taste of the material in her excellent new book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for the book.)
Originally published October 10, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Chris Sloan, a senior editor at National Geographic Magazine, points me to a cluster of new blogs he and others at NG have just launched. Sloan’s own blog includes a refreshingly frank discussion of the forged-fossil controversy NG was involved in a few years ago.
Science Blogs meanwhile continued to absorb blogs in Borg-like fashion. Among the new additions is one I’ve followed for a while, Laelaps, which covers stuff like fossil horses, human evolution, and such. Long live the organisms.
Continue reading “Link Love: National Geographic Blogs and A New Sibling”
In January I’ll be running a workshop for science graduate students at Yale about how to write about science for non-scientists. It’s going to be the second time around for me; last year’s trial run was a wonderful experience, which confirmed to me that scientists-in-training these days want very much to be engaged in the public discussion of the stuff they do. Information about the workshop and how to register has just been posted on the Yale Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology web site (poster pdf) I’m told the slots are filling up fast, so if any readers at Yale are interested, check it out.
“Just wanted to jump on the bandwagon with my own tribute to my scientific style. This is a tattoo of the word for Body, Spirit, Person, People, and Life in Owens Valley Paiute, written in International Phonetic Alphabet. I am a Linguist that specializes in Endangered languages and thought I needed this tagged on me.”–Russ
Will tattoos be all that remains of some languages? Something to ponder as you peruse the science tattoos I’ve posted on Flickr–76 and rising.
Originally published October 5, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.