Sublime

For the last few decades, the weapon of choice against invasive rodents has been Brodifacoum, an anticoagulant that induces internal hemorrhaging. Brodifacoum can be incorporated into bait and then dispensed from feeders, or it can be spread by hand, or dropped from the air. (First you ship a species around the world, then you poison it from helico

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthu

Given the increasing availability of the tools, the presenter painted a harrowing vision: Someone could soon create novel pathogens far more transmissible and lethal than anything found in nature. These synthetic pathogens could evade known countermeasures, spread asymptomatically, or have built-in resistance to treatments. If needed, someone could

E. coli uses many tricks to dodge antibiotics. As Florey and Chain discovered, it can secrete enzymes that cut penicillin into harmless fragments. In some cases, E. coli’s proteins have taken on new shapes that make it difficult for antibiotics to grab them. And in other cases, E. coli uses special pumps to hurl antibiotics out of its interior. For

positively charged magnesium ions, which are normal constituents of living cells, positioned themselves to solve the charge-repulsion problem of folding a highly negatively charged RNA.