The Loom » Writing Elsewhere

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 ...

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]

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.

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]

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 ...

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 ...

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.

The Cosmic Performance: My new profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:35:22 +0000

I’ve just written a profile of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the best-known scientific figure in America. Here’s how it opens:

On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon has appeared briefly and then slipped below the western horizon, leaving the sky to blinking airplanes rising from La Guardia fifty miles to the south, to satellites gliding in low orbit, to Jupiter and its herd of moons and to the great river of the Milky Way beyond.

The crowd that sits in this chilly field in North Salem, New York, is surrounded by a ring of telescopes. There’s a Dobsonian, a giant barrel-shaped contraption that’s so tall you have to climb a stepladder to look through its eyepiece. Small, squat Newtonian cylinders sit on tripods, rigged to computers that give off a weak lamp-glow from their monitors. A few older men are fussing over the telescopes, but everyone else is ...

2011: A Letter from the Loom

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:19:38 +0000

In 2011, the Loom reached its eighth birthday. Thanks to everyone who’s paid a visit or become a loyal reader in that time. With the year coming to a close, I spent a little time this week perusing the Loom’s archive, reflecting on the things that obsessed me during 2011.

More than many years, this one reminded me just how huge science is. Even if you limited yourself to the most important stories of this past year, there was just too much to keep up with. (Here’s Discover’s top 100 picks.) As a science writer, my focus is biology, but that didn’t ease my year-long case of head-spinning. The anchors that kept me from spinning away completely were the very small and the very complicated.

At the small end of the spectrum were, among other things, the bacteria that call us home. Like every year, 2011 saw outbreaks, such as the E. coli that sickened thousands in Germany. But now that we can read the genomes of these killers, as I noted in Newsweek, we can see how chillingly fast new pathogens can evolve.

But the good germs also ...

Strain Game: My piece on bird flu, terrorism, and open science in Slate

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:06:30 +0000

Eckard Wimmer makes viruses from scratch. When he first made a polio virus out of raw ingredients in 2002, some congressmen drafted a resolution to condemn him. Today, he’s making viruses that act like vaccines.

Wimmer was one of several virologists I called over the past couple days to talk about the controversy swirling around altered bird flu viruses that have the scientific community deeply worried. Their reactions are all over the board, from those who think the research shouldn’t have even been done in the first place to others who want the research published in full and replicated many times over. My report is over at Slate. It’s a debate that gets to the heart of the scientific process in the twenty-first century. Check it out.

The Rise of the E-book: My new essay for Nature

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:24:13 +0000

In this week’s issue of Nature, I write about the revolution that technology is bringing to the world of books. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been experimenting with e-books myself, and I’ve been giving some talks about them (I’ll be helping to lead a discussion at Science Online 2012 in January).

My essay is accompanied by this funny picture. The guy looks a lot like me, but, strictly speaking, it should be my wife sitting atop the pile of books, with seagulls for company:

In the summer of 2010, on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, I saw the future of books. I had been invited to teach a writing course at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, a beautiful bulge of rock covered in scrub and herring-gull nests. During a break at the beach with my family, my wife finished reading her book with typical supersonic speed. She craved another, so decided to experiment with her new iPhone.

She tapped the screen. In seconds, an e-book had streamed invisibly through the air into her ...

The French Disease, the Italian Disease, the Christian Disease–the New World Disease?

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:35:13 +0000

In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.

I’ve been intrigued by the murky history of syphilis for a few years now. The text above is from the start of an article I wrote for Science in 2008. At the time, scientists were split between two explanations for sudden appearance of syphilis at the end of the fifteenth century. According to one, it was caused by bacteria that had evolved in the New World and were brought back to Europe by Columbus’s crew. But other researchers found many skeletons with signs of syphilis in Europe, Africa, and Asia that appeared to have been from long before Columbus’s voyage. They argued that it must ...

When Sight Shapes Sound (And Vice Versa)

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:27:31 +0000

We take in streams of information of radically different forms: photons through the eyes, textures through the skin, air vibrations through the ears, molecules through the nose. Marvelously, we manage to integrate all that information into a unified, coherent feel of the world. It turns out that as we draw in these different streams, we use information from one sense to shape what we take in from others. It’s an efficient way to make the most of our imperfect perceptions. But it also leaves us vulnerable to some remarkable illusions, like the one illustrated in this video.

In my latest column for Discover, I explore our powers of multi-sensory integration. Check it out.

Presenting a new ebook: More Brain Cuttings

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:01:34 +0000

Last year I decided to play in the ebook sandbox. I brought together some of my favorite pieces about the brain in an anthology I entitled Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. I teamed up with the publishers George Scott and Charles Nix, and we produced an ebook.

Along the way, we learned a lot. I recounted some of the lessons in this piece for the Atlantic, and others in this conversation with the writer Steve Silberman. Suffice to say, publishing ebooks is by no means a frictionless utopia for writers. Nevertheless it remains strangely addictive. Perhaps we writers get the same jolt of dopamine that readers get when they tap a glass screen and are rewarded with a new book.

It just so happens I now have some new material to keep fueling my addition. I’ve continued to write about the brain, and recently I selected another crop of favorites. This new ebook has made it down the digital assembly line, and is now available for $7.99: More Brain Cuttings: Further Exporations of the Mind (Amazon, Barnes & Noble).

You’ll find a range of subjects here. ...

A Long Walk To Land

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:33:52 +0000

Long before Darwin published The Origin of Species, there was talk of evolution. The more acquainted naturalists became with the major groups of animals, the gaps between them grew smaller. Once it seemed as if mammals were profoundly different than other vertebrates, for example. And then European explorers encountered the platypus, a mammal that laid eggs. Perhaps the major groups of animals had not been separately created, some naturalists suggested. Perhaps life had changed over time.

In 1837, a profoundly paradoxical creature was shipped from West Africa to London, packed in clay. It was destined for Richard Owen, the greatest British anatomist of his age. He picked away the clay, to reveal a creature that looked like a fish. It has a knife-shaped body, gills, and fins. “If indeed the species had been known only by its skeleton,” Owen wrote, “no one could have hesitated in referring it to the class of Fishes.”

But inside its body, Owen found what he could only call lungs. Its whisker-like fins had a chains of bones that faintly resembled arms. Owen was a fierce opponent of all the transformationists of his day, and ...

Do you own your germs? My new piece for the New York Times on micro-bioethics

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:20:35 +0000

There are 100 trillion microbes that live in your body. Do you own them? Do they deserve the same protections as your own genes and cells? If someone genetically alters a microbe and claims that if you swallow it, it will let you lose weight, should that living germ be regulated as a drug?

These are a few of the questions I mull in a piece that appears in the Sunday Review section of today’s New York Times. I’ve been writing a lot about the microbial world for a few years now, but only recently did I encounter a group of bioethicists who are now pondering what sort of ground rules we should set up to govern science and medicine as we gain understanding and power over the microbiome. Check it out.

If you’re interested in reading more about all this, here are a few new papers (some free, some behind paywalls).

The Human Microbiome Project: lessons from human genomics: Trends in Microbiology (in press)

a close look at arsenic life on its first birthday over at MSNBC. Other scientists have yet to report whether they can replicate the results or not (the bet of many experts is on not). Meanwhile, other researchers are studying its biology, sequencing its genome, and otherwise investigating it as they would any new microbe. It seems as if the arsenic life affair is morphing into regular science. Which may be about as good of an ending as one could hope.

The year has been an intriguing one for me as a journalist–I’ve found writing about arsenic life as both science and the sociology of science to be very satisfying. Here’s a round-up of my main pieces:

1.Of Arsenic and Aliens, The Loom, 12/2/10

This was the first post I wrote, on the day ...

Peace, war, and evolution: My profile of Steven Pinker in tomorrow’s New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:49:41 +0000

The New York Times has launched a series called Profiles in Science. When I was invited to join the undertaking, I proposed writing about the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. I had run into Pinker at the World Science Festival in June, and he had told me about his next book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which was due out in the fall. In the 800+ page tome, Pinker argues that rates of human violence have been crashing for millennia, and he offers psychological explanations for the fall.

I’ve followed Pinker’s work since I first came across his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. In the wake of the book’s success, he quickly became a leading exponent of evolutionary psychology, coming out swinging against its critics such as Stephen Jay Gould. When Pinker described his book to me, I was intrigued. I wondered how someone who argued that human nature was shaped long ago by natural selection would end up arguing that human nature–or at least human experience–is now changing rapidly for the better. But there were other things I was wondering–how, for example, does a writer of massive books about human nature live inside the ...

Scaling the Barrier: My new column on the brain

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:19:52 +0000

Our brains are protected by an invisible fortress wall, keeping it safe from many dangers. Unfortunately, it also keeps out a lot of the drugs that could help cure diseases of the brain. In this month’s column for Discover, I look at some of the newest strategies for scaling the wall. Check it out.

Image: Ken Lund, Flickr, via Creative Commons

Dinosaurs in flight: the movie

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:15:39 +0000

Earlier this year in National Geographic, I wrote about how feathers evolved long before flight. This timing naturally raises the question, how did feathered dinosaurs take to the air? My article was accompanied by a picture from the University of Montana lab of Ken Dial, who argues that before dinosaurs flew, they flapped their wings to help them travel up and down inclines. While not all experts accept Dial’s hypothesis, it has the undeniable strength that he can gather evidence for it in living birds, rather than just inferring behavior from fossils alone.

This video shows some of the astonishing climbs birds can make with the help of some wing flapping. It’s a mix of lab climbs and footage from the wild, with an evolutionary tree of birds.

This is a skill that takes time for birds to develop, as shown in this video below. Dinosaurs might have gradually acquired the skill as well, as their arms evolved into more bird-like wings.

Dial argues that this flapping would also help on the way down, too. Here’s a young bird leaping to the ground, and flapping its wings to control its fall.

By the time dinosaurs had evolved the ability to use feathers ...

The “Language Gene” Turns Ten

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:18:07 +0000

Ten years ago this month, a team of University of Oxford scientists published a description of a family who struggled with words. By comparing their DNA, the scientists zeroed in for the first time on a gene associated with language, dubbed FOXP2. In my newest column in Discover, I look back at what scientists have learned over the past decade about how FOXP2 works, and what it tells us–or leaves us wondering–about how language evolved. Check it out.

Slime molds creep into the New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:24:59 +0000

My editor at the New York Times called me a few weeks ago and said, “Slime molds! Can you write something about them?” Moments like that fill me with gratitude.

Here’s my story, on the cover of tomorrow’s Science Times. I look at how they solve the evolutionary puzzles of altruism, build highway systems, and turn out to be some of the oldest life forms on land.

(And for more on the ever-expanding worldwide diversity of slime mold, check out the Eumycetezoan Project.]

[Image: myriorama/Flickr via Creative Commons]