If you took a census of life on Earth, you’d probably find that the majority of life forms looked like this. It’s a virus known as a bacteriophage, which lives exclusively in bacteria. There are about 10 million phages in every milliliter of coastal sea water. All told, scientists put the total number of bacteriophages at a million trillion trillion (10 to the 30th power). Bacteriophages not only make up the majority of life forms, but they are believed to have existed just about since life itself began. Since then, they have been evolving along with their hosts, and even making much of their hosts’ evolution possible by shuttling genes from one host to another. Thanks in large part to bacteriophages, more and more bacteria are acquiring the genes they need to defeat antibiotics. Bacteriophages also kill off a huge portion of ocean bacteria that consume greenhouse gases. If you suddenly rid the world of all bacteriophages, the global climate would lurch out of whack.

Continue reading “Deadly, Tiny, and Ready For Its Close-up, Mr. DeMille” →

Spiteful bacteria. Two words you probably haven’t heard together. Then again, you probably haven’t heard of altruistic bacteria either, but both sorts of microbes are out there–and in many cases in you.

Continue reading “Spite in a Petri Dish” →

Marriage, we’re told by the president and a lot of other people, can only be between one man and one woman. Anything else would go against thousands of years of tradition and nature itself. If the president’s DNA could talk, I think it might disagree.

Continue reading “Adam and His Eves” →

After a couple months of merciless story deadlines, hard disk crashes, and strange viruses that you only find out about once you have kids, the Loom is creaking back to life. Expect several postings this week. For now, let me direct you to a review I wrote a couple weeks ago for The New York Times Book Review about Devil in the Mountain, a book about the Andes. The author, an Oxford geologist, dissects these mountains like a surgeon cutting open a living person. It reminded me of the times I’ve driven around with geologists; all of the landscape that blurs past most of us is a vast palimpsest to them, and waving their hand out the window, they tell you about hundreds of millions of years of mountain building and destruction. Short of grabbing a geologist for a ride, I’d suggest getting the book.

Continue reading “Blog Revived” →