The Loom

Animal Friendships: My cover story for Time magazine

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:42:33 +0000

I’ve got a story on the cover of the latest issue of Time. It’s about the evolutionary origins of friendship. For a number of scientists, friendship–in a deep sense of the word–is not limited to our own species. The fact that friendship may be a widespread biological phenomenon could help us better understand why it has such a positive effect on our own health.

If you’re interested in the scientific literature, the best way in–and the way I first started to get familiar with it–is this review in the latest issue of Annual Review of Psychology by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, two of the world’s leading primatologists.

One thing that I delve into in the story is the question of just how widespread animal friendship really is. We don’t know, in large part because scientists haven’t done that many long-term field studies on wild animals. When scientists do watch dolphins or baboons for decades, they can see some bonds between unrelated individuals that last for long stretches. (Yet another value that comes from slow-cooked science.) On the other hand, what may look like friendship may just be anthropomorphic ...

The Future of E-books–podcast of my interview on Wisconsin Public Radio

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:31:16 +0000

WPR has posted the podcast of my talk last week on the Ben Merens show on their site–including a lot of interesting comments from callers. (Direct link to MP3)

[Image: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom on an Iphone. Gasp! Prepare for the Apocalypse! Photo by badosa on Flickr/Creative Commons]

Thursday, February 16: Science and social media panel in New York

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:57:18 +0000

Next week is Social Media Week, during which time the American Museum of Natural History is hosting an exploration of science and social media. It will take place on Thursday, 2/16, at 6 pm, and after the official panel discussion there will be a beer and wine reception in the Museum’s Hall of Minerals and Gems.

The panelists for the evening include–

Ben Lillie, the physicist turned spoken-word impresario who has founded the delightful Story Collider

Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

Ruth Cohen, Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at the American Museum of Natural History, who will talk about how the museum uses apps to help kids learn about urban biodiversity

–and me. I’ll talk about how social media (primarily the Loom) turned me into a curator of science tattoos and then an author of a decidedly unusual coffee table book.

The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer Kingson, an editor in the Science Department at The New York Times.

The event is free, but you need to register on the event page.

A Scientific Jonah: My profile of Joy Reidenberg in tomorrow’s New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:08:06 +0000

For anyone in the US who likes to know what it’s like inside a giraffe (hands up, people), it was frustrating to discover the show Inside Nature’s Giants airing on British TV. The best we could manage were snippets on YouTube. Now the show is here in the States. The other day I spent some time with one of the main scientists of the show, Joy Reidenberg, an anatomist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. I’ve written a profile of her, both as a researcher who’s discovering fascinating new things about whales, and as that most improbable thing: a celebrity anatomist. Check it out.

Be sure to take a look at the extras on the page, such as the podcast, video, and graphic instructions for how to dissect a 50-ton whale.

[Photo courtesy of Joy Reidenberg]

Ebooks on the radio: 6 pm ET tonight

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:10:00 +0000

I’ll be talking on Wisconsin Public Radio with host Ben Merens about ebooks and the future of publishing. I’ll be on for the hour from 5 pm to 6 pm CT (6-7 ET) You can listen live here.

Flu Fighters

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:26:23 +0000

Michael Osterholm, his face a pink-cheeked scowl, looked out across the table, beyond the packed room at the New York Academy of Sciences, and out through the windows. The New York Academy of Sciences is housed on the fortieth floor of 7 World Trade Center, and their endless bank of windows affords a staggering view of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. One reason that its view is so magnificent is that there’s a huge gap in the skyline–and a huge gouge in the ground–where the Twin Towers once stood.

Osterholm had come here from Minnesota, where he runs a research center for infections diseases and terrorism, to talk Thursday night about the threat of a new kind of flu sitting in labs in the Netherlands and Wisconsin. In nature, it’s a flu that spreads easily between birds but doesn’t travel well from human to human. The Dutch and Wisconsin scientists had found ways to get this bird flu, known as H5N1, to move between ferrets. For Osterholm, ferrets were uncomfortably close to humans on the evolutionary tree. And so he, along with other members of an advisory board, issued a recommendation in December that key information in the papers about ...

The Crux: My response to Jonathan Franzen’s e-book rant

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:18:27 +0000

The novelist Jonathan Franzen delivered quite a rant about e-books the other day. He’s deeply wrong, as I explain at the Crux by going shopping for a copy of The Great Gatsby. Check it out.

Life turned upside down

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:59:46 +0000

Thousands of papers get published every week, but every now and then a truly strange one pops up. On December 23, a new journal called Life published a paper by Case Western Reserve University biochemist Eric Andrulis called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.”

At Ars Technica, John Timmer unpacks this 105-page paper and delves into the weirdness, in a post called “How the craziest f#@!ing paper got published and promoted.”

The basic idea is that everything, from subatomic particles to living systems, is based on helical systems the author calls “gyres,” which transform matter, energy, and information. These transformations then determine the properties of various natural systems, living and otherwise. What are these gyres? It’s really hard to say; even Andrulis admits that they’re just “a straightforward and non-mathematical core model” (although he seems to think that’s a good thing). Just about everything can be derived from this core model; the author cites “major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet ...

Viruses learn new tricks, in real time: my story in tomorrow’s New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:03:42 +0000

Charles Darwin recognized that natural selection can make eyes sharper, muscles stronger, and fur thicker. But evolution does more than just improve what’s already there. It also gives rise to entirely new things—like eyes and muscles and fur. To study how new things evolve, biologists usually have to rely on ancient clues left behind for hundreds of millions of years. But in a study published today, scientists at Michigan State University show that it’s possible to watch something new evolve in front of their eyes, in just a couple weeks.

The scientists were studying a virus, which evolved a new way of invading cells. As a result, their research not only sheds light on a fundamental question about evolution. It also suggests that it may worryingly easy for viruses such as influenza to turn into new epidemics. Check it out.

[Image of lambda virus: AJC1 on Flickr via Creative Commons]

Archaeopteryx: The Embargoed Tattoo

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:03 +0000

A fair number of scientists like to get a tattoo to celebrate their research. Ryan Carney, a biologist at Brown University has taken the practice one step further. He’s gotten a tattoo that shows the key finding of a paper he and his colleagues have just published today. They studied a fossil feather from Archaeopteryx, the iconic bird (or almost-bird). They conclude it looked just like this tattoo.

Carney collaborated on the research with a team of scientists who have developed a method to reconstruct colors from fossils. One source of colors in animals is a cellular structure called a melanosome. Depending on the size, shape, and spacing of melanosomes, they can produce a range of hues. It turns out that melanosomes are incredibly rugged, sometimes enduring for millions of years.

As I wrote in the New York Times in 2009, the scientists first found melanosomes in the ink sac of a fossil squid and then went on to look at a 47-million-year-old bird feather. Then they went on to look at the feathers and feather-like structures of dinosaurs, reconstructing some of the colors of their plumage. The color pattern, ...

Science Ink in New York: This Tuesday

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 05:52:54 +0000

This Tuesday I’ll be giving a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences about Science Ink–complete with live tattooed scientists!

Here are some of the details…

When: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. (A reception will follow.)
Where: The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600

Get $10 dollars off full-price tickets by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here: http://www.nyas.org/scienceink

See you there!

Evolving Bodies: A Storify follow-up

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:51:57 +0000

In yesterday’s New York Times, I wrote about a new paper in which scientists report the evolution of single-celled yeast into multicellular snowflake-like “bodies.” Most (but not all) of the experts I contacted for the story had high praise for the study. (It also won an award when it was presented as a talk over the summer at the Society for the Study of Evolution.) Once the story appeared, however, some scientists took to Twitter to express their skepticism. As much as I like Twitter, this is one of the situations where it fails. You can’t have a conversation about genetics, lab strains versus wild types, etc., in 140 character chunks. At least not very satisfying ones.

So here’s what I decided to do last night. I used Storify to collect the comments of Leonid Kruglyak of Princeton and Michael Eisen of Berkeley, and then passed them on to Will Ratcliff, the lead author of the new study. He then responded. Below you’ll find the Storify tweets, and then Ratcliff’s response. Please continue the conversation in the comment thread. (And be sure to download the paper–it’s open access.)

[View the story "Yeast evolving" on Storify]

Will Ratcliff responds:

Well, I ...

Evolving Bodies: My new story in tomorrow’s New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:25:18 +0000

In the history of life, single-celled microbes have evolved into multicellular bodies at least 25 times. In our own lineage, our ancestors crossed over some 700 million years ago. In tomorrow’s New York Times, I write about a new study in which single-celled yeast evolved into multicellular forms–completely with juvenile and adult forms, different cell types, and the ability to split off propagules like plant cuttings. All this in a matter of weeks. Check it out.

(The paper is not yet online yet, but here’s the reference: “Experimental evolution of multicellularity,” William C. Ratcliff, R. Ford Denison, Mark Borrello, and Michael Travisano. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1115323109 )

Update: Here’s a Twitter-Storify-blog follow up on some reactions to the study.

A Hot Young Earth: My Answer to the Annual Edge Question

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:47:28 +0000

Each year, literary agent and science salonista John Brockman poses a question about science and gets a slew of answers from scientists, writers, and other folks. This year’s question is

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Brockman got 187 responses, totaling some 126,700 words. A book, you say! Well, if this year is like previous ones, this year’s answers will indeed become a book. But in the meantime, you can browse the answers for yourself, perhaps plucking out those of your favorite people. (Fellow Discover blogger cosmologist Sean Carroll chooses Einstein’s explanation of gravity, for example.)

I found this year’s question particularly thought-provoking. Why is it that we call an equation or a theory “beautiful”? They don’t have pretty hazel eyes. They aren’t desert landscapes. I’m not sure of the answer. Scientific explanations seem to be beautiful if they give sense to confusing complexity in a very short space. Or maybe we just like the feeling we get when we consider how our puny human brains can interpret the universe.

For a lot of physicists, the beauty of an equation seems to be a good hint that it’s ...

Words bring life to life

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:58:16 +0000

Drew Berry is one of the great movie-makers of the molecular world. He makes gorgeous computer visualizations of DNA, proteins, and the various goings-on inside the cell. Last night I spent a little time watching a new TEDx talk of his just posted online. My first thought was, “Why didn’t I get to see these movies when I was learning about biology as a kid? Life is unfair.” Compared to the flat cartoons of textbooks, or even the crude animations in documentaries of yore, Berry’s work seems to come from some advanced alien civilization.

In case you haven’t seen Berry’s work before, I’ve embedded his lecture here. (You may have heard about him when he got a recent Macarthur “genius” grant.) If you have seen his stuff before, I’d suggest you watch this anyway. And this time, don’t just watch. Listen.

When I first saw Berry’s work a while back, I was immediately gob-smacked. But as I watched his synchronized swimming of molecules a while longer, I realized after a while that I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on. I didn’t know the names of the molecules I was looking at, and, more importantly, I couldn’t tell what ...

Inside Darwin’s Tumor

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:04:34 +0000

Cancer evolves. Those two words may sound strange together. Sure, birds evolve. Bacteria evolve. But cancer? The trouble arises from the fact that cancers, unlike birds and bacteria, are not free-living organisms. They start out as cells inside a person’s body and stay there, until they’re either wiped out or the person dies.*

Yet the same forces that drive the evolution of free-living organisms can also drive cancer cells to become more aggressive and dangerous. Evolution becomes our inner foe if mutations disable a cell’s self-restraint. The cell multiplies. Sometimes a new mutation arises in its descendants. If the mutations allow the cancer to grow faster, the cells carrying it will take over the population of cancerous cells. Natural selection and other processes that drive evolution on the outside start driving it on the inside.

Like so many other scientists, researchers who study cancer evolution have jumped on new technology for sequencing genomes on the cheap. They’re now starting to publish fine-grained histories of the disease, tracking individual mutations as they arise and spread. Nature has just published a fine example of this new research. I particularly appreciated the informative pictures they came up with to accompany ...

Life with a capital L? (Like Zimmer with a capital Z?)

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:39:42 +0000

Over on Facebook, David Hillis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, took up my question as to whether anyone can define life in three words. His short answer was no, but his long answer, which I’ve stitched together here from a series of comments he wrote, was very interesting (links are mine):

Like all historical entities (including other biological taxa), it is only sensible to “define” Life ostensively (by pointing to it, noting when and where it began, and following its lineages from there) rather than intensionally (using a list of characteristics). This applies to the taxon we call Life (hence capitalized, as a formal name). You could define a class concept called life (not a formal taxon), but then that concept would clearly differ from person to person (whereas it is much less problematic to note examples of the taxon Life). So, I’d say that I can point to and circumscribe Life, and that it the appropriate way to “define” any biological taxon. A list of its unique characteristics is then a diagnosis, rather than a definition. So, I’d argue that any ...

Science Ink on this week’s Science Friday

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:36:17 +0000

I’ll be on National Public Radio’s Science Friday this week to talk about Science Ink. Host Ira Flatow and I will be chatting during the 3 pm EST hour. In the meantime, the folks at Science Friday have set up a slide show preview.

Can you define life in three words?

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:59:38 +0000

We are all sure we know what life is, but if you try to actually define it, things get tricky fast. I wrote a feature about the scientific struggle to define life in 2007 for Seed, and I’ve been keeping tabs on the evolution of this metaphysical quandary ever since. I was particularly intrigued to discover recently that one scientist thinks he can define life–and do so in just three words. I’ve written an essay about his short and sweet definition for the web magazine Txchnologist. Check it out.

Any deadly viruses to declare?

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:15:32 +0000

Today, a company called Ion Torrent announced they were going to start selling a DNA-sequencing machine that can sequence an entire human genome for $1,000. It’s just the latest milestone in the long-term crash in the cost of gene-reading. There are lots of benefits that will flow from this ongoing transformation. For one thing, as I wrote in 2010 in the New York Times, it’s getting easier to identify new viruses that could turn to be the next HIV or SARS.

To research my story, I paid a visit to the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University. On the day I dropped by, Ian Lipkin and his colleagues were very busy:

Some researchers were examining New York flu, others African colds. The blood of patients with mysterious, nameless fevers was waiting to be analyzed. There was dried African bush meat seized by customs inspectors at Kennedy Airport. Horse viruses, clam viruses: all told, members of Dr. Lipkin’s team were working on 139 different virus projects. It was, in other words, a fairly typical day.

Some of the research that was going on that day–specifically, the ...

Resurrecting Evolution to Solve an 800-Million-Year-Old Puzzle

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:17:45 +0000

This is a story of about how the parts of a puzzle locked into place 800 million years ago. The puzzle is an ion pump that you can find in any mushroom, mold, or yeast. I’ve reproduced a picture of it here.

Fungus cells, like our own cells, have lots of little pouches inside of them for carrying out special kinds of chemical reactions. In order for those reactions to work, there have to be a lot of positively-charged protons inside the pouches. To get those protons into the pouches, ion pumps like this one force them through membranes.

This pump (which is is offically known as a vacuolar ATPase complex) is a wonderfully complex collection of proteins. They fit together elegantly, and they cooperate to get this vital job done. One particularly cool feature of this pump is the ring lodged in the pouch’s membrane, where it spins around like a wheel. The ring is made up of six proteins–four copies of a protein called Vma3, and a single copy of two other proteins called Vma11 and Vma16–that lock together. If a mushroom can’t make all three types of proteins, ...

The Wall Street Journal ogles tattoos, and more #scienceink news

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:33:04 +0000

1. Good morning. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal features Science Ink in their Visualizer Column. I stopped by their offices on Friday and recorded an interview with WSJ editor Gary Rosen, which I’ve embedded below.

2. In other news…Amazon has Science Ink back in stock, and they’re offering it at half price.

3. The Huffington Post Science section featured Science Ink, which surely must bode well for its future.

4. I’ll be on the radio this week talking about the book–details to come!

5. Finally, let me just remind New Yorkers that I’ll be speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences about Science Ink on Tuesday, January 24, at 7 pm.

Here are some of the details…

When: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. (A reception will follow.)
Where: The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600

Get $10 dollars off admission by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here:http://www.nyas.org/scienceink

Huffington Post + Science. A New Leaf?

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:26:07 +0000

Today the Huffington Post is launching a new science “channel,” overseen by a full-time science editor. This should be interesting.

The Huffington Post is one of the most popular places for getting news and opinion, attracting well over 30 million views a month. It started out mainly as a blogging network, and then added on a lot of aggregation of news stories, supplemented by slide shows. More recently, they’ve been hiring full-time reporters and editors on subjects like politics and economics.

When it comes to science, this set-up has led to some…well, let’s call it checkered coverage. You could find your way to straight news stories about science from the Associated Press and other outlets, along with some lightly re-written syntheses of articles elsewhere. Some strong voices in the science world paid visits from time to time to share some thoughts. But the Huffington Post has also run some real stinkers in the past–the kind that send readers to the ER with foreheads fractured by particularly powerful desk-slams.

This morning, Arianna Huffington herself introduced the channel with a long post. Here’s its opening:

I’m delighted ...

A Planet of Viruses: A Booklist Editor’s Choice of 2011

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:06:30 +0000

Thanks to Booklist for a late Xmas present: they put A Planet of Viruses on their Editor’s Choice 2011 list!

The book is currently available in hardback and ebook; the paperback will come out in May.

January 24: Science Ink comes to the New York Academy of Sciences

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:38:04 +0000

Greetings, Gothamites! If you’re free Tuesday, January 24, please join me for a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. I’ll be delivering an anthropological lecture about an intriguing sub-culture that expresses itself with body inscriptions. I speak, of course, of scientists with tattoos.

At my last talk, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the evening was enhanced with the presence of actual, flesh-and-blood scientists with tattoos, some of whom appear in the pages of Science Ink. If you are a member of this inky, geeky clan and are planning on coming to the New York talk, please let me know so that I can try to work you into the presentation.

Here are some of the details…

When: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. (A reception will follow.)
Where: The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40th floor
New York, NY 10007-2157
212.298.8600

Get $10 dollars off full-price tickets by using the promo code ZIMMER. Register here: http://www.nyas.org/scienceink