The Ed's Up #80

 

Selfish Shellfish Cells Cause Contagious Clam Cancer

"This cancer—this clam leukaemia—seemed to be transmissible. If you took the blood of infected clams and injected it into healthy individuals, some of those recipients would develop the disease. For years, scientists suspected that a virus was involved. Michael Metzger from Columbia University has a different explanation. His team has discovered that the thing that transmits the cancer isn’t a virus, but the cancer itself. The clam leukaemia is a contagious cancer—an immortal line of selfish shellfish cells that originated in a single individual and somehow gained the ability to survive and multiply in fresh hosts." (Image: Michael Melford, National Geographic Creative)

Could Mothers’ Milk Nourish Mind-Manipulating Microbes?

"Breast milk seems like a simple nutritious cocktail for feeding babies, but it is so much more than that. It also contains nutrients that feed the beneficial bacteria in a baby’s gut, and it contains substances that can change a baby’s behaviour. So, when a mother breastfeeds her child, she isn’t just feeding it. She is also building a world inside it and simultaneously manipulating it. To Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who specialises in milk, these acts are all connected. She suspects that substances in milk, by shaping the community of microbes in a baby’s gut, can affect its behaviour in ways that ultimately benefit the mother." (Image: Mothering Touch)
 

More good reads

• “It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything.” Kathryn Schulz on wonderful form about the science and history of invisibility.  And here’s a second piece from her on the phrase “No, totally”.
• A beautiful new piece from Oliver Sacks on life’s need for constancy, and the disorder of sickness
• BRONTOSAURUS FOREVER! Brontosaurus returns as a true dinosaur genus. The name, of course, comes from the Greek words for “IN YOUR FACE, PEDANTS” and “lizard”.
• The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust. By Tim Maugham
• “Can two forces threatening the sustainability of sharks—the fishermen of Mexico and consumers in China—help the fish survive?” By Erik Vance
• Maryn McKenna on a “1000-year-old MRSA remedy”, discussing the fascinating lost science but also the significant regulatory hurdles to come.  
• This amazing street art only appears when it's raining
• On the colours of alien landscapes, by Nicola Twilley
• “Once they have listened to a nightingale in full voice, they yearn to hear that sound again. Its absence lessens our lives.” Helen Macdonald on our emptier springs.
• The dark side of the moon. Nadia Drake on new evidence that our moon was formed when a Mars-sized planet crashed into Earth.
• "It is easy to forget, when the sky goes dark, that an eclipse is an optical illusion." A great account of not quite seeing an eclipse, by Lavinia Greenlaw
• Veronique Greenwood explores the science of the perfect chips.
• In light of the Rolling Stone debacle, Christie Aschwanden talks about how the “cult of narrative” trips up journalism, and Ivan Oransky asks if science is really better than journalism at self-correction.

Book recommendations

The Heretics, by Will Storr (aka The Unpersuadables in the US) is an incredibly perceptive look into the forces that drive people to believe in wacky things. Storr combines hard investigative journalism with a degree of compassion and self-deprecation that is rarely found in this genre. He's also very funny.
 

"Why do obviously intelligent people believe things in spite of the evidence against them? Will Storr has travelled across the world to meet an extraordinary cast of modern heretics in order to answer this question. He goes on a tour of Holocaust sites with David Irving and a band of neo-Nazis, experiences his own murder during 'past-life regression' hypnosis, takes part in a mass homeopathic overdose, and investigates a new disease affecting tens of thousands of people - a disease that doesn't actually exist."

Love and Treasure, by Ayelet Waldman, tells three stories, set in differing time periods, united by a single piece of jewellery. Unlike many novels which use this device, Waldman's constructs a whole that is truly greater than, and illuminated by, the sum of its beautifully constructed parts.

"A fugitive train loaded with the plunder of a doomed people. A dazzling jewelled pendant in the form of a stylized peacock. And three men - an American infantry captain in World War II, an Israeli-born dealer in art stolen by the Nazis, and a pioneering psychiatrist in fin-de-siècle Budapest - who find their carefully-wrought lives turned upside-down by three fierce women, each locked in a struggle against her own history and the history of our times. And at the centre of Love and Treasure, nested like a photograph hidden in a locket, a mystery: where does the worth of a people and its treasures truly lie?"

 

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed