Salon.com > Leonard Cassuto

“A Planet of Viruses”: The diseases that drove history

Wed, 18 May 2011 01:01:00 +0000

If I told you that you have a virus, there's a good chance that you'd go running to your PC to check that your antivirus software is up to date. Perhaps you'd discover that your computer had been infected by a highly contagious bug -- a software microbe that threatened the health of your hard drive.

But a computer virus is just a metaphor for an actual living thing -- the most abundant form of life on earth. In "A Planet of Viruses," science journalist Carl Zimmer goes back to the source and surveys the world of real viruses in nature. His absorbing account combines epidemiology, marine biology, genetics, biochemistry, and population history (among other pursuits) as it hops from virus to notable virus -- only polio is oddly missing -- to tell a story that emphasizes both the long history of viruses and their fundamental importance to how humans have evolved and lived.

“The Disappearing Spoon”: The fascinating history of the periodic table

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

When I was a child, my dentist once gave me a small sample of mercury to take home in a tiny jar. (It helps when your dentist is also your cousin.) I loved the heaviness of mercury, its slipperiness, its way of breaking up into globules that would then merge back into a large droplet. I loved that mercury was a liquid metal — how cool is that? — and years later when I saw "Terminator 2," with its villain whose body would re-form when splashed apart, I thought less about director James Cameron's dazzling special effects than about my own fascination with mercury. Sam Kean opens "The Disappearing Spoon" with an almost identical story of his own childhood play with a ball of mercury, so you might say that he had me at hello. But his book goes well beyond the opening anecdote to provide a lively and edifying history of the elements.

Big trouble in the world of “Big Physics”

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 19:30:00 +0000

In February 2000, a promising young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schön published some startling experimental results. Schön and his partners had started with molecules that don't ordinarily conduct electricity, and claimed they had succeeded in making them behave like semiconductors, the circuits that make computers work. The researchers reported their findings in Science, one of the flagship scientific journals.

The data created an immediate stir. Schön, who works at Lucent Technologies' prestigious Bell Labs, followed that paper up with another, and then another. In his world of "publish or perish," he became a virtual writing machine, issuing one article after another. His group reported that they could make other nonconductors into semiconductors, lasers and light-absorbing devices. These claims were revolutionary. Their implications for electronics and other fields were enormous, holding the promise that computing circuitry might one day shrink to unimaginably small size. In the words of one Princeton professor, Schön had "defeated chemistry." He had become a modern alchemist, apparently conducting electricity where it had never gone before.