The Ed's Up #85

Can The Microbes You Leave Behind Be Used to Identify You?

"When you touch a surface, you leave behind fingerprints—distinctive swirling patterns of oils that reveal your identity. You might also deposit traces of DNA, which can also be used to identify you. And you leave microbes. You are constantly bleeding microbes into your surroundings, and whenever you touch something, bacteria hop across from your skin. So, could the DNA of these tiny variable residents also reveal our identity, just like fingerprints or our own DNA?" (Image: Jakub)

Meet the Comical Opah, the Only Truly Warm-Blooded Fish

"There’s nothing about the opah that says “fast-moving predator”. Tuna, sharks, and swordfish are fast-moving predators and accordingly, their bodies look like streamlined torpedoes. By contrast, the opah looks like a big startled frisbee, with thin red fins stuck on as an afterthought. It’s pretty (silver body and red fins) and big (up to two metres long), but fast? Nicholas Wegner from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration certainly didn’t think so when he first started studying it. Since then, he has discovered that the opah is an active predator, which has a trait that no other fish possesses. It is warm-blooded." (Image: NOAA Fisheries)
 

Book recommendation

Infested, by Brooke Borel, tells the story of the bed bug's origin, fall, and return. I admit that I wasn't sure if this one insect would warrant an entire book but Borel totally proved me wrong; the book is a joy, the writing is witty, and the bug (and the people it has dragged along in its wake) proves to be a fascinating subject.

Bed bugs. Few words strike such fear in the minds of travelers. In cities around the world, lurking beneath the plush blankets of otherwise pristine-looking hotel beds are tiny bloodthirsty beasts just waiting for weary wanderers to surrender to a vulnerable slumber. Though bed bugs today have infested the globe, the common bed bug is not a new pest at all. Indeed, as Brooke Borel reveals in this unusual history, this most-reviled species may date back over 250,000 years, wreaking havoc on our collective psyche while even inspiring art, literature, and music—in addition to vexatious red welts.
 

More good reads

• A great profile of optogenetics pioneer Karl Deisseroth, who helped to revolutionise neuroscience with light. By John Colapinto.
• “They have found a way to turn the beaks of chicken embryos back into dinosaur-like snouts.” Carl Zimmer on dino-chickens.
• "If you think of our planet as an eyeball, the Antarctic plateau is its iris, and the Dark Sector its pupil." This is a majestic piece from Ross Andersen on cosmology’s faltering winning streak, and the recent BICEP2 controversy. Long but incredibly readable.
• "Why Pluto’s Moons Turned William Shatner Into a Sad Volcano". By Nadia Drake, with wonderful Shatner quotes.
• What would the world be like if we could grow babies in artificial wombs? A new podcast about the future, from Rose Eveleth.
• What happens to our bodies when we die. Fascinating Mo Costandi piece.
• Water: really familiar but also the weirdest liquid on the planet. By Alok Jha
• Kathryn Schulz reviews the wonderful Nell Fink, featuring Jonathan Franzen and a kookaburra. Like all of Schulz’s work, a joy to read.
• Dying Trees Can Send Food to Neighbors of Different Species via 'Wood-Wide Web'. Incredible story by Jennifer Frazer.
• The Central African Republic has gone from a million elephants to a few thousand. A tragic read from Peter Canby .
• 2,147,483,647—the number that downed spacecraft and broke YouTube, Gangnam Style. A fascinating look at a problematic computing glitch, by Chris Baraniuk

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