The Birds, the Bees and the Platypuses E-Book

Michael Groß

• Herausgeber: Wiley-VCH
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Erlebnis Wissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 347

Beschreibung

Michael Gross has been writing about science full time for the last eight years and as a night time hobby for the previous seven. From his treasure troves, he now presents his favourite science stories from these 15 years. What are the attractions that make him revisit a topic or reread an article again and again? Often, it's the sheer craziness of wildly unexpected findings or grotesquely oversized challenges. In other stories, there is a sexy element or an unexpected insight into the human condition. And sometimes, when reporting new and future technologies, the author just can't help thinking: »cooooooool!« So here are more than 60 crazy, sexy and cool science stories for you to enjoy.

Leseprobe

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The Author

www.michaelgross.co.uk

Michael Gross School of Crystallography Birkbeck College Malet Street London WC1E 7 HX United Kingdom

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Table of Contents

Related TitlesTitle PageCopyright PagePrefaceAbout the Author1 - Crazy Creatures2 - Sexy Science3 - Cool TechnologyEpilogue: The Next Fifteen YearsIndex

Preface

Science is fun! In seven years as a hobby reporter, and almost eight as a full-time freelance science writer, I have accumulated dozens of stories which I still remember fondly, because they were so much fun to write (and hopefully just as much fun to read). These are the stories that still tempt me to waste my time rereading them for the nth time if I stumble across them in my archives. These are the stories that I have used and reused over the years, cited as examples, or attached to my CV. These are the stories that – in my eyes, at least – demonstrate that science is a cultural activity just as rich and varied as literature and music, and just as rewarding.

What makes these stories stand out among the roughly 1000 others I have written over the years? I have identified three defining criteria, of which my favorite science stories may display one or more. Borrowing a title from TLC, I sorted them into a table with the headings crazy, sexy, and cool. Crazy stories include the weird, the unexpected, and the plain crazy stuff that scientists come across, and quite often discover to be actually useful. My favorite example of this kind are the wildly unorthodox antibodies found in camels and llamas, which have turned out extremely useful for biotechnology. There are also some stories of challenges so daunting that only crazy scientists would take them on. The genome sequence of our Neanderthal cousins springs to mind. Sexy stories are sometimes about sex (from attraction through to reproduction), but sometimes about other obsessions and characteristics of our race. Some of them just tell us what makes us human. Cool stories are mostly about cool inventions, devices, gizmos, and gimmicks. Many of them were invented by scientists, but there are also a few that were invented by evolution.

For each of these stories, I have started from a manuscript I wrote for publication (in a magazine or newspaper), revised and/or expanded it, and added an introductory paragraph explaining what makes this particular story special. Where appropriate, I also attached an epilogue summarizing further developments. Within each of the three main sections, stories are arranged more or less chronologically, so one also gets a feel of how science has progressed in the years I’ve covered. At the bottom of each piece, the year of its first publication is given in brackets.

Many of these stories appeared originally in Chemistry World, the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry, or in its predecessor, Chemistry in Britain. A few articles from Nachrichten aus der Chemie (magazine of the German Chemical Society, GDCh), and Spektrum der Wissenschaft (the German edition of Scientific American), however, were published in German only, so I’ve translated them for this book. A couple of old Spektrum pieces reached this book via reflection by the earlier books Life on the Edge, and Travels to the Nanoworld. So it’s all a big hall of mirrors, like the Y chromosome (page 38).

Some of these stories have also appeared in Bioforum Europe, Bio-IT World, Current Biology, The Guardian, New Scientist, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Chemie in unserer Zeit. I am grateful to all the editors who have commissioned my work over the years. Some of them developed the ability to read my mind, which can speed up the process and make life easier for me. But even when they ask challenging or really silly questions they help me to share my excitement with the readers.

Fifteen years is an extremely long time in scientific research, as I realized when editing the stories from the 1990s, some of which already had a somewhat historic, pre-genomic feel to them. Some of the things that I found exciting back then (and still do) appear to have fallen from fashion, while others have blossomed spectacularly. Some of the researchers involved have now got a Nobel Prize to their name; others appear to have disappeared from the radar. Such is life, even in science.

Above all, however, I am hoping to convey the impression that science in the last decade and a half was never boring, and that with every new answer that researchers work out, a host of new, even more exciting questions are likely to pop up, providing an endless supply of crazy, sexy, and cool findings.

Oxford, March 2008

Michael Gross

About the Author

Michael Gross was born in Kirn, Germany, but considers himself a European citizen. He began his writing career on the school’s magazine, covering arts and humanities from Asterix to Picasso. As his Bohemian dreams of writing books in a Parisian café did not fulfil immediately, he opted for studying the sciences, and eventually managed combine his writing addiction and scientific training in a career as a full-time science writer after all not in Paris, but in Oxford. He earns his living mainly with the publication of articles in magazines, but also does some editing, translating, and lecturing, and occasionally writes entire books. Though his scientific interests span from quantum computation through to psycholinguistics, his heartfelt sympathy is with the strange creatures that live in volcanoes, the deep cold sea and hot geysers.

Michael Gross has been writing about science full time for the last eight years and as a night time hobby for the previous seven. From his treasure troves, he now presents his favourite science stories from these 15 years. What are the attractions that make him revisit a topic or reread an article again and again? Often, it’s the sheer craziness of wildly unexpected findings or grotesquely oversized challenges. In other stories, there is a sexy element or a an unexpected insight into the human condition. And sometimes, when reporting new and future technologies, the author just can’t help thinking: “cooooooool!” So here are xx crazy, sexy and cool science stories for you to enjoy.

1

Crazy Creatures

“If, at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.”

Albert Einstein

I have a natural tendency to favor slightly eccentric stories from science over the ones where a relevant question has been investigated and answered in a straightforward, almost predictable way. The craziness that interests me can arise from the random walks that evolution takes across time, or it may be found in the mind of the scientists who take on challenges so daunting that no sane person would bother with them. Or it could be both or somewhere in between. There is a whole spectrum of scientific craziness and crazy science.

But then again, some of the areas covered here started out as a blip of craziness in the margins of modern science but have since evolved to become mainstream research fields, possibly even with commercial potential. You never know what might happen, that’s part of what makes eccentric topics so rewarding.

Squeezy Little Bears

The crazy creatures at the extreme ends of life on Earth have fascinated me for many years. As both my PhD thesis and one of my books dealt with life under extreme conditions, I’m no longer that easily impressed by tales of life in boiling water, sizzling deserts, or permanent ice. However, the following story (which unfortunately came up too late for the original edition of Life on the Edge) beats them all. If anybody wants to send animals to Mars, I suggest they try the “little bears” or tardigrades. The following text is adapted from a postscript included in the paperback edition of Life on the Edge.

Tardigrades are microscopically small animals reminiscent of downsized bears, at most half a millimeter long. They live in water droplets suspended in moss and lichens and can be found on all continents. Now if you’re such a tiny little bear exposed to the elements, you need some very special survival skills.

Tardigrades have at least two major emergency routines. If their habitat is flooded and there is a risk of oxygen shortage, they inflate to a balloon-like passive state that can float around on the water for days. If, however, the threat comes from a lack of water, they shrink to form the so-called tun state (because it looks like a barrel), which could be described as the animal equivalent of a spore. Researchers have managed to resuscitate tardigrades by rehydrating moss samples after up to 100 years of storage on museum shelves, which proves the quite remarkable long-term stability of this state.