Writing Elsewhere
loom | March 21, 2008My latest Dissection column for Wired.com takes on the old tug-of-war between Nature and Artifice. As I write in my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, scientists began to manufacture strange versions of the microbe in the early 1970s. In 1974, for example, scientists engineered E. coli carrying DNA from a frog. The difference between such "unnatural" bacteria and "natural" ones may seem obvious, but today the dividing line is surprisingly tricky to draw, and will only get trickier. In my new column, I describe the first systematic attempt to do so. Check it out.
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loom | March 6, 2008How old is the Grand Canyon? One answer is easy: a lot older than a few thousand years. A more precise answer is harder to get at, however. You have to climb into the caves of the Grand Canyon and read the geological clocks hidden there. For more, read my latest "Dissection" commentary at Wired.
Photo: Luca Galluzi at Galuzzi.it [via Wikipedia]
loom | February 25, 2008My latest story for the New York Times is up: it's a sneak peek at the Encyclopedia of Life--a web site that will ultimately contain detailed pages about all 1.8 million known species. Right now it's just a demo site, but on Thursday, there will be thousands of pages up, each with details on a different species. Will it reach its goal? As I point out in the article, previous attempts have failed. Their remnants are littered across the Web, such as the All-Species Foundation. But the scientists behind the Encyclopedia of Life have a lot of tools, like wikis and text-mining, that their…
loom | February 24, 2008The history of science is rife with fateful meetings. The astronomer Tycho Brahe hires a young assistant named Johannes Kepler, who will go on to discover in Brahe's observations the law of planetary motion. A bright but aimless British physicist named Francis Crick is introduced to a boisterous young American biologist named James Watson. The two soon discover they share a curiosity about a strange molecule called DNA. And on a warm afternoon in the early spring of 1838, the young Charles Darwin climbed into an orangutan's cage.
That's the start of my introduction to the recently published…
loom | February 7, 2008Why are modern families so small? Could it have something in common with peacock tails? A fascinating essay in the new issue of Science is the basis of my newest column for Wired. And man oh man, are the commenters freaking out. Judge for yourself.
The Natural History of the Only Child
loom | February 2, 2008A quick favor from anyone who has read any of my books. If there's a passage--sentence to paragraph range--that you're fond of, can you let me know? I'm working on a project that requires a bunch of them. You can leave them in this post's comment thread or over on a discussion thread I set up on my Facebook writer's page, or--if you'd prefer not to air such things in public--you can email me. Thanks!
loom | January 25, 2008So the news came out yesterday that Craig Venter's crew has now synthesized an entire microbe's genome from scratch. This does not send a chill down my spine. Does that mean I'm missing a piece of my brain? Judge for yourself, in my new commentary for Wired. (Also, check out Rob Carlson's typically clear-eyed assessment.)
loom | January 22, 2008Before I left for Rome earlier this month, I finished up a bunch of projects. They started trickling into public view while I was away. I was going to post them all in my article archive, but I just realized I need to update the format of my site to include stories from 2008. So, in the meantime, I'll have to point you to other sites, some of which require subscriptions...
[Update: I've posted the articles on my site. You can find them all here.]
1. Your Inner Fish. Last year I wrote about the discovery of the fish with proto-hands, Tiktaalik. One of its discoverers, Neil Shubin, has written…
loom | January 2, 2008Bora and his hard-working crew have picked the entries for the next anthology of science blogging, Openlab 2007. My entry on how tapeworms evolved into parasites made the cut. See the full list here.
loom | December 20, 2007Nobody wants to be hit on the head with a ten-mile asteroid. But what if giant impacts are actually good for life in the long-term? I contemplate that strange possibility over at Wired.com. Check it out.
Meteorites May Have Fostered Life on Earth
loom | December 12, 2007In my latest column for Wired, I take a look at the ever-fascinating intersection between engineering and biology. An electrical engineer-turned-ecologist uses the principles of circuits to track the flow of genes in endangered species. Remarkably, it works. Take a look.
loom | December 7, 2007Here is my first obituary in the New York Times, for Seymour Benzer. (It was pure coincidence, apparently, that they contacted me a couple days after I blogged about Benzer here.) It's a nerve-racking experience summing up someone's life in a few hundred words, especially a life as jam-packed as Benzer's. Here's one of many things that didn't make it in: Benzer's quest to find the genetic basis for loving spicy Asian food (via Jim Hu)
loom | December 4, 2007Back in 2005 my daughter Charlotte, then a four-year-old, took part in a study to see how kids stack up mentally against chimpanzees. I wrote about the ambivalent experience of watching her as both a father and a curious science writer in the New York Times. The emerging lesson of the study, led by Yale grad student Derek Lyons, was that children overimitate even though they should know better. Lyons showed the children how to get a toy out of a container, adding in lots of unnecessary tapping of walls and sliding of rods and such. Other scientists had tested chimpanzees on similar…
loom | November 28, 2007The Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology has rolled out the "Stevens Seventy," the seventy greatest science books since 1900. If you click all the way through to Z, my 2000 book Parasite Rex ends the list. Many thanks.
As the introduction to the list points out, these things are always arbitrary, so judge for yourself. Did they leave any classics off? Did they honor an unworthy title?
loom | November 8, 2007This is a new and fascinating map. It shows how next spring is probably going to come early here in New England, as it has come earlier and earlier for the past few decades. But in Florida it will probably come late. Both changes stem from the same source: our carbon addiction. I explain why in my first foray in a new column for Wired.com called Dissection. The column, on all manner of science, will come out every other Friday. Let me know what you think, there or here.
Greenup of the Planet Is Not Black-and-White
loom | October 25, 2007Ugh. Several days, pretty much day and night, going over the copy-edited Microcosm manuscript with a green pencil. I haven't had any time to write any original blog posts--or even reply to most of my email. But I can at least point you to three articles of mine that went online while I was buried deep in dangling participles. Looking at them now, I see a common theme: comparison.
1. The Internet and E. coli. Some of the most intriguing papers I've read about E. coli while researching Microcosm came from an engineer. John Doyle is a control theory expert at CalTech who has spent lots of time…
loom | September 10, 2007The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives--professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow's New York Times about moray eels. It turns out that they have bizarre jaws hidden in their throats that catapult forward into their mouth to grab prey.
If you read other blogs at Scienceblogs, this may sound like slightly old news. That's because the paper describing this research came out on Wednesday in the journal Nature, and…
loom | September 6, 2007I want to give readers of the Loom a heads up about book that I've edited that's coming out in November. The author is a very interesting writer named Charles Darwin.
In 1871 Charles Darwin published pretty much his first and last word about human evolution: The Descent of Man. It's a marvelous, but sometimes maddening book. Darwin did a remarkably good job of hypothesizing how humans evolved, especially when you consider that barely any hominid fossils had yet been found. But Darwin packed the book with detail, a lot of it having to do with all sorts of animals other than Homo sapiens. I've…
loom | September 6, 2007I think he may be under the influence.
If not, thanks.
Okay--narcissism stops...now.
loom | September 5, 2007Earlier this summer my cover story on the meaning of life (or, at least, "life") came out in the July/August issue of Seed. Now, at long last, the Seedsters have posted the story online. Read it here.