loom | January 30, 2008Earlier 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 our conversation spilled out on the street. And one of the things we talked about was the question of whether you can put your signature on a living thing.
The question came up thanks to Craig Venter and his team, who announced last week that they had synthesized the entire genome of a microbe. The…
loom | January 28, 2008I'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 it and post at least some of it on Yale's Itunes site as a free podcast. I'll let you know when that becomes available.
Then I head for Washington DC, where I'll be moderating a discussion Wednesday about synthetic biology. It's part of the Seed/Schering-Plough Science + Society Series, in which…
loom | January 28, 2008I 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--Natasha Mitchell hosts a radio show about the brain in Australia
The End of the Pier Show--Henry Gee, Nature editor, Tolkien guru, dinosaur maven, garage band monster...the list goes on
ERV--A grad student tries to explain biology to the intelligent design crowd. Frustration and hilarity ensue.
Florida…
loom | 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 two of my personal favorites. Check out all 131 images.
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 24, 2008How 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 can happen in sudden steps.
Even before I had finished reading Judson's piece, I got an email from the prominent evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne grousing about it. Coyne, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is an expert on the genetics of adaptation as well as the origin of new species. He…
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 21, 2008A 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 Charlotte was born? she asked.
Actually, before I was born, I said. They were built before I was born, and fell down before I was born.
That last part was a bit too much for her.
Trying to comprehend deep time was actually the reason we were in Rome in the first place. I was invited to give a lecture…
loom | January 7, 2008I'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 write up a summary of the lecture for Il Sole 24 Ore, an Italian newspaper. I'll post the original English when I get back for anyone who's interested.
In the meantime, there's plenty of good stuff out there to read. For example, check out Linnaeus' Legacy # 3, a carnival of taxonomy-related blogs…
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 | January 2, 2008I'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 people could create lists of friends and add various applications. Now they've made the site more flexible with "pages," which can be opened by businesses or--in my case--individuals. The format allows me to create a page that's a lot more like my own web site. It's got information on my upcoming talks…
loom | January 1, 2008Sorry 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, here, and here), so it's sad to see that there might not be much to write about in years to come unless the world gets its act together.
loom | December 26, 2007Last 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 authors of the new study proposed that the ancestors of whales originally lived this way. Gradually, the whale lineage became more adapted to life in water and shifted to eating meat, as exemplified by early whales like Ambulocetus, which was something like a furry alligator.
In the comment thread,…
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 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 science tattoo train started to peter out this month. But then Boing Boing unleashed a tidal wave of scientific ink in my direction. Now we're up to 111 pictures, with over 296,000 views of the Flickr set. I don't even know what those numbers mean anymore.
And the press's fascination does not stop. The…
loom | December 19, 2007When 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 walked. As I later wrote in my book At the Water's Edge, Thewissen has discovered some crucial clues to the transitions that the ancestors of whales made from land to sea. In Pakistan, he discovered a 47-million-year-old fossil called Ambulocetus natans, that had an otter-like body. It was the first…
loom | December 18, 2007Is 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 previously thought--3 to 5 megatons, instead of 10 to 20. And since there are many more asteroids in that smaller size range, the risks of a devastating impact may be greater than previously thought. Maybe not enough to cause mass extinctions, but to knock out a fair piece of real estate. Go here to read…
loom | December 17, 2007This 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 are the bugs' synthetic metabolisms that LS9 predicts it will be able to sell the fuel for just $1.25 a gallon.
Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms - washingtonpost.com
loom | December 16, 2007I'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 into another great die-off.
loom | December 12, 2007Some 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 Carlson for a recent article in Discover.) Even though a week or two may pass between posts, they're always interesting. His latest entry, on the hype around Craig Venter's development of artificial chromosomes, is like a very sharp needle poking a very fat balloon:
...the philosophical implications…