loom
Posts by this author
January 30, 2008
Earlier today, I took a walk in the blustery winds of Washington DC with Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist from MIT. We had just been talking with Congressional staffers about the promise and perils of being able to manipulate life. There was too much to fit into the ninety minute session, and so…
January 28, 2008
I'll be yammering this week.
First stop on the yak fest, tomorrow morning, is over in New Haven, where I'll be running the first session of a two-part science writing workshop for science graduate students at Yale. It's my second year at this, so I'm hoping it goes smoothly. We're going to record…
January 28, 2008
I know you read every one of the Scienceblogs. But if you still have some extra free time to kill in an interesting way, check out my updated blogroll over to the left. It's a selection of some of the blogs I check out semi-regularly. Here are details on a few of the additions.
All in the Mind--…
January 25, 2008
"Here are my two Copernicus/scientific revolution homages. I teach science at a public school in eastern MA. It's nice to see the size of the subculture of science geeks that are also tattoo geeks." --Chris
They're two of the newest contributions to the my flickr set of science tattoos, but they're…
January 25, 2008
So 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…
January 24, 2008
How do new kinds of bodies evolve? It's a question that obsesses many scientists today, as it has for decades. Yesterday, Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist and book author, published a blog post entitled "The Monster is Back, and It's Hopeful," in which she declared that these transitions…
January 22, 2008
Before 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…
January 21, 2008
A few days ago, my family was wandering the ruins of the Roman Forum. I explained to my daughters that the fragments of pillars around us were very old. Veronica, who is four, wanted to know how old.
They were made before she was born, I explained. Before her sister Charlotte was born.
Before…
January 7, 2008
I'm neglecting my blog at the moment, because I have to finish up a bunch of stories before I take off on a pretty long trip. Along the way, I'm giving a talk at the Rome Science Festival about mass extinctions. If, unlike me, you can read Italian, you can get the details here. I'm also supposed to…
January 2, 2008
Bora 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.
January 2, 2008
I've been nosing around Facebook and Myspace for a few months now, trying to understand how these kinds of sites will influence the work of writers like myself. No terribly clear answers yet, but some interesting experiments underway. Facebook, for example, used to only have "profiles," where…
January 1, 2008
Sorry to start the New Year on a down note, but the January 1, 2008 issue of the New York Times has a review I wrote about a book called No Way Home. It's a sobering look at the decline of the world's great migrations. I've written a fair amount about the marvels of migration in recent months (here…
December 26, 2007
Last week I wrote about a new study that identified a fossil mammal as the closest relative to whales, helping to shed light on how whales moved from land to sea. The mammal, Indohyus, was a small four-legged creature that probably spent a fair amount of time in water and ate vegetation. The…
December 20, 2007
Nobody 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
December 20, 2007
"My right forearm has a 8" ruler on it that I use for everything from measuring PVC diameter to wire lengths. My background is in embedded hardware design, but I choose to spend my time doing experimental building, transportation, and energy these days. The tattoo gets used daily."--Mikey
The…
December 19, 2007
When I first met Hans Thewissen, he spending an afternoon standing on a table, pointing a camera at a fossil between his feet. He asked me to hold a clip light to get rid of some shadows. I felt like I was at a paleontological fashion shoot.
Thewissen was taking pictures of bones from a whale that…
December 18, 2007
Is it wrong to find pictures of destruction beautiful? This is a frame from a supercomputer simulation of the Tunguska meteorite. It exploded over Siberia in 1908 and flattened miles of trees. The simulation suggests that the devastation could have been caused by a far smaller explosion than…
December 17, 2007
This is the sort of thing that made me decide to write a whole book about these bugs...
LS9 Inc., a company in San Carlos, Calif., is already using E. coli bacteria that have been reprogrammed with synthetic DNA to produce a fuel alternative from a diet of corn syrup and sugar cane. So efficient…
December 16, 2007
I've got a new conversation up at bloggingheads.tv. This time around I talk to University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward about the mass extinctions that wiped out millions of species in the past, and how disturbingly difficult it is to rule out the possibility that we're sending ourselves…
December 12, 2007
Some of the blogs that I find most interesting are also the most sporadic. Fortunately, RSS feeds mean their occasional utterances don't disappear off my radar. Rob Carlson's blog, synthesis, is an excellent, deeply considered blog on the rise of synthetic biology. (Full disclosure--I interviewed…
December 12, 2007
In 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.
December 10, 2007
In tomorrow's New York Times, I have a story about some very fun research--the study of the world's biggest gulp. Some new research indicates that the biggest species of whales eat by gulping their own weight in water every thirty seconds. They do so in much the same way a parachute stops a race…
December 8, 2007
I've set up a web page for the workshop I'll be teaching at Yale next month. If I had to sum up my line of work in four hours, a few things to read, and one writing assignment, this would probably be it.
December 7, 2007
Here 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…
December 7, 2007
""I did my Ph. D on olfaction in sea turtles, sequencing the olfactory receptor genes of the three species featured in my tattoo (leatherback, loggerhead and green). The "bubbles" represent DNA."--Dr. Michelle Vieyra, University of South Carolina.
Congratulations, Dr. Vierya--your submission is…
December 4, 2007
Back 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…
December 3, 2007
My latest conversation at bloggingheads is up--a discussion of stem cell biology and politics with Lee Silver, Princeton biologist and author of Challenging Nature. Check it out.
December 1, 2007
My bad--for some reason I thought my piece on NPR would air this morning. It was on the news tonight. And you can listen to it here.
December 1, 2007
The great biologist Seymour Benzer passed away yesterday. If you know Benzer, it's probably through Jonathan Weiner's masterful book, Time, Love, Memory, which focused on how Benzer discovered the influence of genes on behavior in fruit flies. But Benzer was one of those rare scientists who had…
December 1, 2007
Last year I wrote about the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, which injects venom into cockroaches to turn them into zombie hosts for their parasitic offspring. (More posts on Ampulex here.) The scientists I wrote about have been trying to figure out what exactly the venom does to the…