The Ed's Up #143

Book news

It's 7 weeks from the US publication of I Contain Multitudes, and I've got a couple of dates for your diary. If you're in New York, I'll be talking to Radiolab's Robert Krulwich about the book at the Strand Bookstore on August 10th, and also talking at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 18th. Meanwhile, back in England, I'll be speaking at the Off the Shelf Festival in Sheffield on October 24th. Come one, come all! More details about these events and others to come. And as ever, you can pre-order the book now. 

The Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

"In the northwest coast of Spain, a delicious clam called the golden carpet shell is suffering from an extraordinary type of cancer—a contagious leukemia. Almost every other case of cancer in animals—including humans—begins when a single cell in an individual starts growing and dividing uncontrollably, producing a tumor. If the tumor kills its host, it dies too. But the clam’s leukemia is caused by cancer cells that have become independent parasites; they can travel between individuals, creating fresh tumors in each new host. And if that wasn’t astonishing enough, this transmissible tumor didn’t even originate in a golden carpet shell. Instead, its genes reveal that it first arose in a related species—the pullet shell. It’s the first known cancer that not only jumps into new hosts but has, at least once, leapt over the species barrier." (Image: Russellstreet)
 

Testing Drugs on Mini-Yous, Grown in a Dish

"His solution was to build organoids—three-dimensional mini-organs that are grown in the lab from stem cells. Over the last 8 years, scientists have built organoids of retinas, stomachs, livers, kidneys, and even brains. These blobs recapitulate many of the complex features of their parent organs, so you can use them to study how those organs form normally, and how that process goes awry in genetic disorders." (Image: Russell Boyce)
 

Humans: The Hyperkeystone Species

"But in analyzing the outcomes of his starfish experiment, Paine missed something obvious and important: his own part in them. Yes, the starfish were influential, but so was he. He, a single human, had reshaped a tiny corner of world. And yet, Paine left himself and his 7.4 billion peers out of the very framework that he had created. At a conference last October, Boris Worm, an ecologist who had known Paine for a few decades, asked him if he thought humans also counted as keystone species. “Oh, we’re above that,” Paine replied. “We’re hyperkeystones.” We are the influencer of influencers, the keystone species that disproportionately affects other keystone species, the ur-stone that dictates the fate of every arch." (Image: Edgar Su)
 

How Climate Change Unleashed Humans Upon South America’s Megabeasts

"South America was once a land of giants. Its plains and forests were home to elephant-sized ground sloths, mace-tailed armadillos the size of a car, and huge creatures that resembled humpless camels. Hunting them were a large subspecies of jaguar, sabre-toothed cats, and the gigantic short-faced bear, several times heavier than a grizzly. All of these giants—the aptly named megafauna—are now gone. Why?" (Image: Jonathan Ernst)
 

More good reads

• Paige Williams profiles Lee Berger, the man behind the Homo naledi discovery, and asks some big questions about how science is communicated.
• The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife: an absolutely astonishing piece of journalism from Ariel Sabar, about a much-disputed piece of papyrus
• How a geologist designed the perfect app for the window seat. By Kelsey Dollaghan
• How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell: an incredible story by Kashmir Hill
• Fancy maths can't make aliens real. Ross Andersen slams a recent bit of wishful thinking in the NYT
• The Most Mysterious Object in the History of Technology: Adrienne LaFrance on the Antikythera Mechanism
• While Brazil Was Eradicating Zika Mosquitoes, America Made Them Into Weapons. By Sarah Laskow
• Brain training games are nonsense. Brian Resnick reports on a study that boosted IQ by 5 points just by telling people they were taking part in a brain-training study.
• And finally, Justin Schmidt’s amazing wine-tasting-like notes of painful insect stings. “Rude, insulting. An ember from your campfire is glued to your forearm.”
• In Indonesia, Non-Binary Gender is a Centuries-Old Idea. By Jessie Guy-Ryan

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed