The Loom
Archives for May, 2004
Ugly Comments, Quiet Blogger
Posted by Carl Zimmer on May 18, 2004 Please accept my apologies for the vile spam comments that keep showing up here. I hope that the folks at Corante and I can find a way to permanently shut down the flow of craven obscenity. I’ve been traveling again, and now I’m racing against a slew of deadlines, which leaves precious little time to…
New Life For Old
Posted by Carl Zimmer on May 4, 2004 Jack Szostak, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, is trying to build a new kind of life. It will contain no DNA or proteins. Instead, it will based on RNA, a surprisingly mysterious molecule essential to our own cells. Szostak may reach his goal in a few years. But his creatures wouldn’t be entirely new.…
Very Noisy Evolution
Posted by Carl Zimmer on May 3, 2004 On the east coast, we’re bracing for the howling emergence of a massive brood of 17-year cicadas in a couple weeks. Here’s a nice piece in the Washington Post about the evolution of this strange life history.