Usually when you hear about the rapid evolution of bacteria, the story is typically some grim tale of antibiotic resistance or the emergence of some pathogen once restricted to animals. Here’s a nicer narrative, but no less instructive. In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an article about yogurt, and how the bacteria in its culture have been undergoing drastic genomic change since the stuff was invented some 5000 years ago.

Continue reading “Adapting to Life in Yogurt” →

If you’re in the neighborhood of Woods Hole, Mass., let me invite you to my talk on Friday, June 9 at the Marine Biological Laboratory. I’ll be talking about human evolution, but given that I’ll be at the Marine Biological Laboratory, I figure I’ll include some discussion of the marine biology in our past.

The talk is at 7 at the Lillie Auditorium, and it’s free and open to the public. Directions are here. 

Originally published May 25, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I’ve been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade.

Continue reading “Invisible Gladiators in the Petri Dish Coliseum” →

Oliver Morton, science writer and Nature news editor, is blogging after a long hiatus at MainlyMartian. He’s reporting from the Synthetic Biology 2.0 meeting in Berkeley. Check it out.

Update: Actually, you may want to check out the cross-posting at Nature’s blogs. Same entries, with comments. 

Originally published May 23, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.