The Ed's Up #152

UK Launch! 

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES is now out in the UK, and you can listen to a really fun interview I did with BBC Radio 5Live's Afternoon Edition. Meanwhile, back in the US, I'm still at #20 in the NYT bestseller list for the second week running, gamely hanging on like a tick on the Grey Lady's buttocks. I also want to highlight this review from The Stranger--the ending makes this the only review to make me think about the book in a new light. 

This week has also marked by one-year anniversary at The Atlantic. I honestly can't think of a better place to work, or a more amazing group of people to work with. The Atlantic claims to hire based on "force of intellect and generosity of spirit" and that is actually what it is like to work there. I'm enormously grateful to my boss Ross Andersen: the science channel started with us, and it has held its own in an election year. I'm looking forward to stepping up a gear in 2016/17.

What Killed the World’s Most Famous Fossil?

"Lucy has since become a household name, and it’s easy to forget that she was more than just an avatar of human evolution. She was also a person. Back when her now-famous skeleton was still wrapped by flesh and skin, she was walking around Africa. She ate, drank, and socialized. She climbed trees. And that, if John Kappelman from the University of Texas at Austin is right, is how she died. Who knows exactly what happened? Maybe she mistimed a jump. Maybe a dry branch gave way beneath her. Maybe she was distracted by a bird. Maybe she was pushed. Whatever the case, Kappelman thinks that Lucy fell—from the tree, to her death, and into history." (Image: Marsha Miller) 
 

The World’s Oldest Fossils Are 3.7 Billion Years Old

"If you condense the entire history of the Earth into a single calendar year, then the bacteria that created the Greenland fossils were alive in the second week of March. And since they were already sophisticated, capable of forming large colonies, life itself must have arisen much earlier, perhaps sometime in mid-February. The implication is that once the Earth was born, it didn’t take long for life to get going. As NASA geologist Abigail Allwood writes in an accompanying commentary, “The cradle of life [might have been] ready and rocking when Earth itself was but an infant.” (Image: Bob Strong) 

 

Captivity Makes Monkey Microbiomes More Human-Like

"Monkeys don’t get much more attractive than the red-shanked douc. It looks like it applied a dusting of rouge to its face—a face that is topped by a black cap, flanked by a white beard, and plastered with a permanently innocent expression. From the neck down, it has a black-and-charcoal shirt with a rusty collar, white sleeves, a pair of hipster-red stockings, and a white tail. Gorgeous. But perhaps slightly less so when you’re running after one, waiting for it to poop." (Image: Art G)
 

Living Russian Dolls

"That is not what happened. Instead, von Dohlen saw red dots against a blue background. The red probe had stuck to the bacteria in the globules. But the blue probe was sticking to the globules themselves. These mucus-filled spheres weren’t enclosing two kinds of bacteria. They were bacteria. Von Dohlen had discovered that the citrus mealybug is a living Russian doll—or perhaps a microbial turducken. The bacteria living in its cells have more bacteria living inside them. It contains multitudes, and its multitudes contain more multitudes. The bigger microbe was eventually named Tremblaya, and its inner companion was called Moranella. And then things got even weirder." (Image: Tatan Syuflana)
 

 

How New Zealand's Glaciers Shaped The Origin of the Kiwi Bird

"Several million years ago, a small bird flew to New Zealand. Arriving there, it found few threats and plenty of opportunities. In the absence of mammals, its descendants gradually lost the ability to fly, as island birds are wont to do. They also evolved to fill those niches that mammals typically occupy, rootling around the leaf litter in search of worms and grubs. They transformed into that icon of New Zealand—the adorable, bumbling kiwi. Or rather, they transformed into the kiwis." (Image: Joel Sartore)
 

More good reads

• The incredible Story Collider celebrates 5 million listens this week. If you aren’t already familiar with it, do check it out: it excels as a science podcast, as a series of live science events, and as a set of training events on science communication. And as a bonus, here’s a day in the life of Executive Director Liz Neeley.
•  “Forget about drones, forget about dystopian sci-fi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here.” By Sarah Topol
• “Another classic finding in psychology—that you can smile your way to happiness—just blew up. Is it time to panic yet?” By Dan Engber
• The darker side of design: how prejudices are built right into technology, objects & places. By Lena Groeger
• This is such an interesting piece on the other forgotten pioneer of optogenetics, by Anna Vlasits
• Google’s plans for quantum computer supremacy, by Jacob Aron
• Snakes kill tens of thousands of people each year. But experts can't agree on how best to overcome a desperate shortage of antivenom. By Carrie Arnold.
• Terrible news for Africa’s elephants. By David McKenzie and Ingrid Formanek
• For the first time ever, DNA was sequenced in space. Here’s my long piece on what this means.
• Adam Rutherford’s book A Brief History of Everyone who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes is out next Thursday and I highly recommend it.
• What Happens If E.T. Phones Us? Maggie Koerth-Baker on a close encounter of the bureaucratic kind
• A sobering look at how long it would take to reach out closest “Earth-like” exoplanet, Proxima B, by Alan Burdick. Also, stop calling it Earth-like, says Miriam Kramer.
• Finally, this is also my solution to the trolley problem. 

 

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed