The Ed's Up 151 -

Book news

I Contain Multitudes has been out for 10 days now and where am I? What is happening? Is this just real life? Ahem. Four very big things happened, and here they are in ascending order.

I had a lovely launch party at Politics and Prose in Washington DC where the assembled throng of 120-140 people cleaned the store out of copies of the book (above; photo by Greg Moran). I got a great review from Ananyo Bhattacharya at The Economist, who notes my love of David Attenborough. I got an even more glowing review from Jonathan Weiner at The New York Times Book Review, who praised the book's "clear, strong, often epigrammatic prose". And I landed an interview with the mighty Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air! (And I made Terry laugh with a truly terrible faecal transplant pun so I can pretty much retire now, after I'm done running through the street and hi-fiving strangers). 

And as a result of all of this, at some point last night, I Contain Multitudes peaked at #28 on the Amazon sales chart, briefly outselling my old nemesis--the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I honestly never imagined that this would happen and it feels amazing. 

How Fins Evolved Into Hands and Feet

"Some people remember where they were when they were told Kennedy had been assassinated, says Neil Shubin. He remembers where he was when his student Andrew Gehrke showed him a picture of a fish fin. For many years, Shubin has studied how ancient fish took their first steps onto land, and how their fins evolved into our arms and legs. He has discovered groundbreaking fossils, published umpteen scientific papers, written best-selling books, and filmed award-winning documentaries on the subject. But Gehrke’s picture told him that he had got one aspect of limb evolution drastically wrong. “I thought I understood what was going on, and I clearly didn’t,” he says. “I literally sat there and laughed.” (Image: Sunphol Sorakul)

 

The Counter-intuitive Way That Microbes Survive in Antarctica

"In July of 2000, during the long, unbroken night of the Antarctic winter, graduate student Jack Gilbert found himself careening through the darkness on a quad-bike. Driving over rocky hills along the continent’s eastern shore, he finally arrived at Ace Lake—a salty body of water that freezes over for several months of the year. It is a truly inhospitable environment, but it still harbors life—microbes, thriving in its frigid waters. These extreme survivors were the organisms Gilbert was there to study. He reached them by drilling through 1.4 meters of ice and pulling up samples of water. Then, he retired to a bare-bones hut for the night." (Image: Reuters)

 

More good reads

• There’s new hope for ending blindness, says David Dobbs—one of our best science writers.
• “Hardly anyone used the Underground Railroad, but it provides us with moral comfort—and white heroes.” The awesome Kathryn Schulz at her best. 
• The once-endangered island fox made the fastest recovery ever recorded for a mammal—but first, conservationists had to kill some pigs and relocate some eagles. By Robinson Meyer.
• "The navigational capabilities of self-driving robots are, at least indirectly, affected by plate tectonics". By Geoff Manaugh.
• This woman may know a secret to saving the brain’s synapses. By Emily Underwood
• "Under the microscope, even the dullest grain of sand develops a personality. So it goes with farts." A genuinely fascinating piece on the science of farts, by Maggie Koerth-Baker.
• A robot buoy saves whales from ship strikes. By Liz Preston
• An algorithm that renders a desired input string in an author's handwriting
• The constellations are sexist, argues Leila McNeill
• And finally… Simone Biles flees from a bee

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed