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Snowfallization

Review of "Sea Change," by Steve Ringman and Craig Welch, Seattle Times. Web site.

Review of "The Course of Their Lives," by Mark Johnson and Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Web site.

Last year on Download the Universe, Veronique Greenwood wrote a review of a story about an avalanche. Journalists write about avalanches fairly regularly, but this piece, called "Snowfall" was different. It was a one-man-band of text, video, maps, and unfolding photos. The story attracted millions of readers and earned scads of awards, including a Pulitzer. And it has ushered in an era of big, ambitious online packages of newspaper reporting. Not surprisingly, science offers some of the best stories for the Snowfall approach.

One recent example is "Sea Change," published last month by the Seattle Times. Photographer Steve Ringman and reporter Craig Welch tackled the immense but little-known disaster that is ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere doesn't just warm the atmosphere. It also lowers the pH of sea water, making the chemistry of the ocean dangerous for some species. Oyster companies are already feeling the effects of the dropping pH, and if we continue to acidify the oceans at our current rate, the ecological effects could be tremendous.

Here's a nine-minute video from the project:

The package Ringman and Welch have created has three main text stories. It starts with an overview of acidification research, which is followed by two close-ups on fisheries that are being affected--namely, oysters and crabs. (Both are economically important to the Seattle Times's local readers.) Welch reports the stories in the classic mode of environmental journalism, mixing together in-person reporting in far-flung locations with explanations of the research that revealed the scale of the problem. The photos are impressive, the videos are well made, and the visualizations--which try to convey how big the phenomenon of ocean acidification is--are fairly successful.

If you've already read "Snowfall," the presentation of "Sea Change" doesn't feel like a bolt out of the blue. But that just shows how much our expectations have shifted. Just look back seven years to a similar series called "Altered Oceans" from the Los Angeles Times, to see what I mean. The authors, Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling, won a Pulitzer for their efforts, which were even more ambitious than "Sea Change." Rather than focus on one way we're ravaging the oceans, they set out to create a picture of all of them, from pollution to climate change.

Although it came out in 2006, the "Altered Oceans" package of stories holds up well today. But the packaging is showing its age. The fancy front page takes you to five stories that are nothing but text. There are also animations and photos, but they're squirreled away in slow-loading pages. After looking at one of these pages, I discovered there was no way to find my way back to the front page again. Seven years of programming advances made "Snowfall" possible--and now raise our expectations for such ambitious online pieces. (Welch recently discussed the making of "Sea Change" with the Columbia Journalism Review.)

From the mountaintops of "Avalanche" and the open oceans of "Sea Change," we take a claustrophobic trip indoors with "The Course of Their Lives." It's a four-part series from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about medical students dissecting the cadavers of people who donated their bodies to science. There's no news here, no warning of an impending disaster. Instead, reporter Mark Johnson and photographer Rick Wood faithfully follow students through a remarkable experience--getting to take apart another human being, down to the brain and guts. Wood and Johnson both bring an emotional sensitivity to the project that makes reading it a deeply moving, human experience.

While I would heartily recommend "The Course of Their Lives," I would also point out some shortcomings. I don't want to belittle the piece by talking about them; they're worth talking about as a way to ponder the kinds of decisions that newspapers make when they create Snowfall-esque stories about science.

Some of the bells and whistles attached to "The Course of Their Lives" don't add much. The videos are mostly of talking heads, who sometimes speak stiltedly. Distilling people's words down in compelling written prose remains a superior technology to a video camera that's simply switched on.

I was also underwhelmed by the interactive anatomical diagrams that went along with the stories. They're meant to illustrate the lessons that the students learned about the cadavers, organ by organ. But who actually needs to see lungs light up on a diagram of a body to know what lungs are? The powers of visualization, both online and in apps, are spectacular. (My favorite anatomical example remains this ebook about Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketchbooks.) But there's no point in using those powers simply to check off a box in a to-do list. It's another lesson that we should respect the technology of prose.

Ironically, the prose itself in "The Course of Their Lives" also felt a bit antiquated. American newspaper journalism long ago settled on a certain style. The paragraphs became short, and the sentences shorter. The words needed to be plain and serviceable. There were perfectly good reasons for this approach--but a lot of them had to do with the physical properties of printed newspapers. Stories couldn't be made of densely packed paragraphs, for example, because editors would need the freedom to cut off sections of stories at the last minute to make them fit their available space.

These were good reasons, but they had some odd consequences. Along with their standard fare of short news pieces, newspapers would also prepare a few massive, long-form pieces--Pulitzer-bait, essentially--but these pieces often retained the staccato structure of short news stories. In these sprawling pieces, that style read strangely. And once New Journalism's masters like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese turned magazine features into a new art form, the adherence to the old style in newspapers became even more peculiar.

Today, as newspapers and magazines shift online, that style has grown even more out of date. If you read stories from publications that got their start online, such as the Atavist, you never find the staccato style of old newspaper stories. There's no need to adhere to it.

Thus "Sea Change" and "The Course of Our Lives" serve as illustrations of journalism in transition--created by people trying to figure out how to bring the best of the old world of newspapers and leave the rest behind.

 

(Photos: Top-Steve Ringman, Bottom-Rick Wood)

Carl Zimmer writes the "Matter" column  for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

 

Rejoicing In Ants With A Citizen Science Ebook

Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants. Text by Eleanor Spicer Rice. Photographs by Alex Wild. Available at The School of Ants. iPad or pdf. Free.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Many plants grow a thick coat around their seeds. The coat, called an elaiosome, doesn't do the seed any good, at least directly. Its immediate job is to attract an insect known as the winnow ant. (The photo here shows winnow ants discovering blood root seeds.) The eliaosome releases fragrant odors that lure the ants, which carry the seed into their nest. There they gnaw away at the coating but spare the seed. The ants then carry the shucked seedback out to the forest floor, where it germinates.

The winnow ants thus act like gardeners, protecting the seeds from predators that would destroy the seeds, while also spreading them far from their parent plant. Remove winnow ants from a forest, and its populations of wildflowers will shrink.

As a resident of the northeastern United States, I always assume that all the magnificent examples of coevolution must be going on somewhere else. The jungles of Ecuador, the Mountains of the Moon--these are the places where nature-film producers go to find species exquisitely adapted to each other. This, of course, just belies my far-less-than-complete education in natural history. While reading Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants, I discovered that winnow ants are abundant in New England, along with the rest of the eastern United States. The next time I am out on a walk in the local woods, I'm going to keep an eye out for these elegant little insects.

Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants is itself an elegant little book--and an instructive example of how ebooks can become a tool in the growing citizen science movement. "Citizen science" typically refers to research that relies not just on a handful of Ph.D. researchers, but also on a large-scale network of members of the public. Birders have been doing citizen science for over a century, and now the Internet enables people to collaborate on many other projects, from mapping neurons in the eye to folding proteins to recognizing galaxies. Many of these projects yield solid scientific results (see this paper in Nature, with over 57,000 co-authors as an example). They also provide a new way for research to draw non-scientists into their world.

A Comic Book Guide to Rewiring Life

Adventures in Synthetic Biology. Story by Drew Endy and Isadora Deese and the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group. Art by Chuck Wadey. Originally published in 2005. Available for free, PDF

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

In the early 1970s, three scientists ran a simple experiment. They cut genes out of the DNA of a frog and inserted them into E. coli. The frog genes functioned in their new home. The microbe was able to make RNA from them, the first step in translating the information in genes into proteins. And when the microbe divided in two, it made new copies of the frog genes along with its own. It was, to some extent, a microbe-frog hybrid.

The experiment was simple only in its concept, though. It had taken the scientists--Herbert Boyer, Stanley Cohen, and John Morrow--years of research to find the tools to do the job, such as enzymes that bacteria use slice up the DNA of invading viruses. And because it had been the first time that anyone had achieved such a feat, it shook the world.

On the one hand, many scientists and pharmaceutical companies saw a huge potential future for gene pasting. Imagine E. coli carrying the gene for human insulin, for example. Instead of harvesting insulin from cow pancreases, it would be possible to brew insulin the same way people brew beer. One company that sprang up in the wake of the frog-microbe experiment, Cetus, promised that by 2000, virtually all diseases would be cured with proteins made through the genetic engineering that Boyer and his colleagues had invented. 

On the other hand, critics saw the apocalypse. Some feared that insulin-pumping E. coli would run amok and spread an epidemic of diabetic comas. If the world embraced genetic engineering, the eminent biologist Erwin Chargaff warned, "the future will curse us."

Forty years after Boyer and his colleagues created their frog-microbe hybrid, the extreme predictions at either end of the prophecy spectrum have failed to come true. No diabetic coma epidemic. (E. coli burdened with human insulin genes can't compete with their lean, wild relatives.) Instead, millions of diabetics get a reliable supply of insulin from the microbes. On the other hand, just having a microbial factory doesn't automatically mean you can cure all diseases. Or even many of them. (I write more about how E. coli launched the biotech industry in my book Microcosm.)

Now, however, genetic engineering is morphing into something new. In the late 1990s, a group of engineers and biologists came together to try to manipulate cells the way they might manipulate the circuits in computer. The analogy between computers and cells is far from perfect, because our bodies are the product of evolution rather than a computer factory. Nevertheless, we have genes that switch other genes on and off, and some genes require inputs from several other genes before they make their own proteins. Cells use this genetic circuitry to detect signals, to process information, and to make decisions. The engineers and biologists set out to rewire that circuitry, inserting many different genes in combinations that would produce new behaviors. They called their project synthetic biology.

In Search Of Our Inner Salamander

Electric Shock:  How Electricity Could Be The Key To Human Regeneration. by Cynthia Graber. Matter, Kindle,  $0.99

The dystopic science fiction author Richard K. Morgan writes stories of regeneration taken to the limit. In his Takeshi Kovacs series, the wealthy or otherwise privileged among humankind (or post-humans) continuously download consciousness –memories, knowledge, personality, everything that makes a self – into hardened storage that can be transplanted from body to newly produced body.  Among much else, these books are meditations on immortality and its discontents, for in Kovacs’ universe, there is death – when one’s body or “sleeve” ceases to function – and the “real death” that occurs when that encapsulated solid-state self gets annihilated.  It’s a complicated dream, this vision in which minds persist in infinitely renewable (and/or interchangeable) bodies.

In 21^st century science, the ambition is a little more grounded; scientists studying the regeneration of organs, tissues and body parts can be said to suffer amphibian-envy.  As Cynthia Graber writes at the start of Electric Shock, “the axolotl, or Mexican salamander, has the ability to regenerate everything from its limbs and tail to its spinal chord and skin…”*  Humans? Not so much:  livers and skin can (partly) replace themselves, and children below the age of twelve, Graber writes, can rebuild fingertips they might be unlucky enough to lose.

Thus the premise for Graber’s story:  what if it were possible to discover how to rebuild much more of the human body at any point in its lifecycle?  Or rather – what if someone out there right now thinks he can make that happen, and soon?

What follows is an elegant bending of a very familiar genre, the common magazine trope of the scientist – profile.  Graber traces the career of biologist Michael Levin from his émigré childhood to his current pursuit of an off-center approach to the problem of mammalian (target: human) regeneration.  Where almost all the attention in the engineering of human tissue has focused on questions of genetics and – at the cellular level – on the manipulation of stem cells.  Such approaches have had their successes, but if the goal is to tell some tissue to “become an arm” then, Levin's story argues, something else is required. 

That something else is the stuff of Dr. Frankenstein’s dreams:  manipulation of the electrical signaling that takes place in every cell in the body.  Graber follows the conventions of profile-writing by taking her readers through a quick tour of Levin’s early life.  We learn he was born in Moscow, brought by his parents to Lynn, Massachusetts at the age of nine, and early showed talent for computers and fascination with the living world.  The catalyst for a life’s work came for Levin at 17, when he chanced upon a book called The Body Electric, written by Robert Becker, a surgeon with an unorthodox streak (to put it kindly).

The book had its excesses, but Levin responded immediately to its reports of lost experiments that had played with electric currents to spark regeneration in marine animals. During his Ph.D work, he seemed to outward appearance to have returned to more conventional biological interests, performing significant experiments on the genetics and biochemistry of development.  But once ensconsed in his own lab, Graber writes, Levin returned to the question of bioelectric signals and the possibility, ultimately, that he could persuade a human arm or eye grow back.

The balance of Graber’s text – roughly the last half – tells what Levin has been able to achieve so far, from growing a four headed flatworm (its own bridge game!) to experiments – still in progress – through which Levin and his collaborators now hope to persuade a mouse finger to grow, replacing an amputated digit.  The most riveting moment in Graber’s account isn’t that one, though.  That falls to Levin’s colleague Dany Adams, who discovered (and partly stumbled upon) a technique for mapping the sequence of electrical signals in cells that map the structure to be developed before that structure begins to form.

Graber’s science writing chops show up here as she manages to convey both the vivid sense of the moment and the explanation of what her readers glimpse in their minds’ eyes.  At the same time she gently – perhaps too much so – points to the big question that (this account, at least) of Levin’s work leaves unanswered:  what is the mechanistic role bioelectric signaling plays in a sequence of events that ends at “eye” or “digit.”

That hints at the one gap I found in Electric Shock.  Levin’s work, Graber told me, is viewed as solid, excellent science by the small community that works on bioelectric questions  But Graber’s account does not return to the question she raises at the beginning, on the interplay between Levin’s view of the body electric and the genetic and cellular processes involved in building new tissues, organs, parts. I grasped Levin’s drive, his pursuit, and his impressive record of successful experiments from this text.  I didn’t get that last step, at least not explicitly:  how Levin’s off-the-beaten-path approach to regeneration fits into the larger corpus of work on the ways organisms build bodies.

That’s a lot to ask of a relatively brief text, of course, and to be clear, I don’t think either that Graber should have written a tome on developmental biology, nor that Electric Shock fails to deliver on its core promise of a gripping story about science told through the life of one passionate scientist. 

But what lifts Electric Shock out of the common run of profiles, is the use Graber makes of the license given her by the fact of e-publication as opposed to a dead-tree assignment.  As Virginia Hughes wrote in this space recently, not all feature stories benefit from the elbow room e-published non-fiction novellas offer.  Graber's text does, going long to reach through the biographic narrative into the sophisticated ideas behind Levin’s work, and thus welcoming its readers to enter into the arguments his experiments seek to test.  But the insight thus gained evokes more questions, the desire to got yet another step into the inquiry.  That’s a good result – recall the show business adage to always leave the punters wanting more – but there’s  a tricky side to this intermediate length: it’s not always easy to see whether you’ve finished the job.

With that caveat – hell, I’ll even cop to a quibble -- the bottom line remains. It's a long leap from evoking a mouse digit to the dreams (or nightmares) of science fiction. But the fascination with the possibility of mastering life's processes -- maybe even the whiff of making mortalitiy malleable -- is common to both.  Electric Shock tells the real story of where that curiousity may lead, the one that's happening now, in a finely wrought account of an intriguing figure.  And all for a price that leaves you change out of a buck!

*Full disclosure:  the piece was edited by my MIT and Download the Universe colleague Seth Mnookin.

Images:  Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, 1492, and  Studies of Embryos, 1510-1513.

Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits.  His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others.  By day he professes science writing at MIT.

A Few Pounds of Microbes, Only Ounces of Insight

Honor Thy Symbionts, by Jeff Leach. Kindle

Guest review by Kevin Bonham

In 2003, the Human Genome Project--an effort to sequence every gene in a human being--was completed. The success, announced to great fanfare, was supposed to herald a new era in health care. Unfortunately, the promises of personalized medicine, in which treatments are tied to a person's genetic sequence, have not yet come to fruition. A few of the reasons for this are obvious (at least in hindsight). Knowing the location and sequence of a gene is one thing, knowing what it does is quite another. And understanding the role that a gene or gene variant plays in a disease, especially when many afflictions are influenced by tens or hundreds of genes, is even harder.

Complicating matters further is the re-emerging realization that genes are not destiny, and now many new "-omics" projects are beginning to gain attention. From the transcriptome (what genes are actually expressed), to the proteome (proteins and protein modification), to the epigenome (modifications of the DNA that regulate gene expression), more and more researchers are attempting large-scale analysis of entire biological systems and trying to extract meaningful information from enormous data sets. In his new ebook, Honor Thy Symbionts, Jeff Leach aims to tackle what is, in my opinion, the most fascinating of these new -omics revolutions: The Human Microbiome Project.

I desperately wanted to like Leach's book. Even though I've repeatedly heard the refrains, "There are 10 times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells," and "There are 100 times more bacterial genes in your gut than there are human genes," and "Bacteria account for 5 to 10 percent of your body mass," these facts never cease to amaze me. And I've been to enough microbiome-related research talks to know that the microscopic bugs that live in our guts can have profound impacts on our health--from metabolic disorders and type-II diabetes to multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. The microbiome deserves a book-length discussion, but Honor Thy Symbionts falls short.

Problems

Problem 1 (I think this is the underlying reason for all of this book's problems): It's not a book, it's a collection of "essays" that are really just blog posts.

In fact, you can go to Leach's website and read almost all of the "chapters" for free on his blog. As I read his alleged book on my Kindle, it was abundantly clear that Leach simply did a large-scale copy-paste, without much additional effort. Spelling and grammatical errors abound, and phrases like "In a series of blog posts starting with this one[...]" only serve to call attention to the fact that I paid three dollars to download something I could just as easily have read on the Internet for free. In one chapter, the text refers to a graph that apparently didn't make it in the migration to Kindle. And since each chapter is really just a blog post, there's no cohesive narrative to tie the book together. Even the unifying "theme" of the microbiome is misleading, since several of the chapters don't even mention microbes.

 

Problem 2: A lot of the science is overstated.

Throughout this book, I had the same feeling of professional scientific unease I get when reading Malcolm Gladwell, without the benefit of Gladwell's ability to spin a narrative. For instance: 

Though improved hygiene has many benefits, scrubbing soil from our bodies and food has thrown our immune system into an over reactive tailspin and is responsible for the skyrocketing increase in allergies and autoimmune disease.

There are several lines of evidence suggesting that hygiene may increase the risk for many inflammatory disorders, but there are plenty of other factors that may play a role, and a marginal increase in risk is a far cry from an "over reactive tailspin."

In another case, Leach describes compelling research suggesting that fiber intake can alter the levels of certain types of microbes. But then he leaps to a prescription how many grams of fiber we should eat each day (an amount significantly higher than current nutritional guidelines).

And in yet another case, Leach spends several pages discussing research on the protein consumption of spider monkeys. Based on this study, he draws conclusions about everything from human diets to agribusiness, sociology and the economics of poverty and health, finally concluding the chapter by pointing out that

This all assumes, of course, that the protein leverage theory plays any role in all of this. Maybe it doesn’t.

At least he admits the ambiguity this time. But then why all the self-assured conclusions? At times I wanted to pull my hair out.

Further complicating this scientific over-reach is Leach's failure to cite the research he's referring to. There's an extensive collection of references at the back of the book, but no link within the text to the reference itself. This seems to be another symptom of copy-pasting from a blog post. The blog posts have web links, but they were apparently were stripped out when the conversion was made.

Problem 3:  Inconsistency of style and complexity.

Leach jumps back and forth from lofty rhetoric:

It is at this interface between the terra firma of our evolutionary past and the enhanced material standard of living[...]

to colloquialisms that border on inanity. Sometimes he makes the jump within a single sentence: 

In just a few thousand centuries, our kind has gone from nesting in trees, to making stone tools and digging roots, to kindling fires, to subduing flora and fauna, to erecting massive cities, and finally to downloading Angry Birds over 1 billion times (and counting).

Leach routinely throws in random and unnecessary digs at creationists. At one he point calls health-care workers who recommend baby formula "predatory." I found the constant movement between grandiosity and link-bait trolling to be jarring. 

Leach also routinely mixes lay-accessible and jargon-laden writing. I know what 16S ribosomal RNA and shotgun pyrosequencing (misspelled as prosequencing) are, but I doubt the target audience of this book will. In some cases, the jargon is useful and adequately explained, but in others it just seems like Leach is trying to show off.

Redeeming Qualities

Despite these glaring problems, I don't think Leach should be written off entirely. A lot of the science he talks about is interesting and important. Our obsession with cleanliness probably does play some role in the increased prevalence of allergies and autoimmunity, even if it's not the only cause. People probably should be eating more fiber, even if we can't make a specific grams/day recommendation. The cheap cost of corn and expense of protein probably explains at least a portion of the paradoxical association of poverty and obesity, even if we can't draw a straight line between spider monkey diets and our own. And the main thesis of this book, that our dietary decisions need to be increasingly informed by our emerging understanding microbiome, is almost certainly correct.

Strangely, Leach himself makes much the same point in the introduction to this book.

While researchers are cautious and right not to oversell the microbiome (much work is still needed to confirm causation for many ailments), the direct or indirect implication of microbes in a staggering number of ailments and diseases of the modern world, reinforces that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift from the orthodox notions of health and disease.

It's a shame that the author failed to exercise some of that caution himself.

Final Verdict

 There are too many problems for me to recommend this book. Prepare an enormous grain of salt and head over to Leach's blog instead. You'll get most of the same material, including web links to the relevant research so you can fact check any claims that seem overwrought. Meanwhile, I will anxiously await a book that tackles the microbiome and does justice to this amazing new field of research.

 

Kevin Bonham is a graduate student studying the immune system at Harvard University. He blogs about microbes and the immune system at We, Beasties on the Scienceblogs network.

Darwin In the Age of Ebooks

The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits , by Charles Darwin. (Free: available on iBooks and Kindle)

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes (guest reviewer)

Charles Darwin wrote many books and many types of books, the most famous of which you can download for free on iBooks or Kindle . How to choose?

If you want a really good story, go with Voyage of the Beagle, the charming journal Darwin kept while working as a naturalist on a ship that went from England to South America, Tahiti, Australia, the tip of Africa and back. The first sentence is enough to pull you in:

The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect.

If you’re looking for scientific import, nothing beats Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that outlined his theory of natural selection and would forever change biology. You might also try The Descent of Man for provocative ideas about race, gender, and sex, or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals for its lively photographs of faces that would inspire a future science of lie-detection.

It’s hard to think of a reason to read Darwin’s last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, unless you’re curious about exactly those things. But for all you vermiphiles, there’s probably no better format for this volume than an e-book.

Darwin began thinking about worms in October of 1837, a year after disembarking the Beagle, when his uncle Josiah told him a curious story. Three years before, Jos had spread a layer of cinders on a field near his home in the English countryside. Since then the cinders had sunk several inches and been replaced with a layer of fine and uniform particles of soil known as vegetable mould. Could it be the work of the worms?

Intrigued, Darwin spent a few weeks closely observing his uncle’s fields. Sure enough, he discovered that the grass was littered with tiny cylindrical castings of worms. The next month, he formally presented his uncle’s idea to the Proceedings of the Geological Society of London: The digestive process of earthworms, en masse, is responsible for creating the vegetable mould that helps crops grow. In this way, Darwin said, the lowly worm is a “geological power.”

That short paper planted a seed for a more substantial book about worms but, because of his many other writing projects, Darwin didn’t get around to finishing it for 44 years. The book isn’t terribly long—some 222 pages on my iPad—but after reading a few pages I thought it might take 44 years to finish.

For better or for worse, the first two chapters—Habits of Worms and Habits of Worms Continued—feel like a transcription of Darwin’s laboratory notebook. Some of his experiments are fun to read about, like when he exposed his potted household worms to the noise of a metal whistle, a bassoon, piano banging, and shouting, all to prove that the critters were deaf. Other observations are not so fun, like the 23 pages describing which end of a leaf a worm pulls into its burrow (for English plants: 80 percent were tugged from the tip, 9 percent from the base, and 11 percent from the middle). Even in the tedious sections, though, the narration has a satisfying intellectual payoff. For example, Darwin uses the worm’s leaf-pulling methods—which are neither random nor instinctual—to argue that the animals have some level of intelligence.

After 86 pages of worm habits, Darwin finally gets into the meat of the theory, describing in detail the soil observations that he made at his uncle’s house and in the decades since. The next chapters are more historical and thoughtful, asking how worms may have played a part in the “burial of ancient buildings” and the “denudation of the land.” It may have been no coincidence that Darwin chose decomposition as his final scholarly subject. By that time he was old, sick and beginning to talk a lot about his own death. He died in April 1882, six months after Worms was published.

While slogging through the book, I kept wondering how it could have been so popular, selling thousands of copies within weeks. Not only that, but Darwin apparently received a lot of fan mail. Readers sent him all sorts of their own stories and questions about earthworms.

Perhaps, rather than a well-paced narrative meant to be read cover to cover, Worms was bought as a handy reference book. Back then, after all, if you saw a strangely shaped worm mound in your backyard garden, you couldn’t do a Google image search to diagnose it.

Thinking of it that way, maybe Worms was a proto-Wikipedia. Darwin constantly references the worm writings of other naturalists, just like Wikipedia’s numerous footnoted citations. Each chapter begins with a paragraph of disjointed clauses that outlines the ideas within, just like the hyperlinked contents box at the top of every Wikipedia page. And you can read the book’s chapters in practically any order—easy as scrolling down a browser window.

Actually, reading Worms the e-book is arguably better than reading about worms on Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, I could bookmark multiple pages, highlight passages and write notes in the margins. Best of all, I was never left wondering about the validity of the source material: This is the authoritative voice of one of the greatest biologists of all time.

So if you’re into worms, by all means download Worms and crawl into its deep, sleepy passages. If you’re not into worms, just read the Wikipedia summary.

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist and Popular Science, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Do we really need to get personal about longevity enhancement?

When I'm 164, by David Ewing Duncan, Published by TED Books (Available for Kindle, iPad, Nook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Half cultural prognostication and half science journalism, David Ewing Duncan's TED Books longread When I'm 64 explores whether medicine will one day make it possible for us to live forever -- and what would happen to human society if we did. It's a hotly debated topic, and Duncan takes his time tackling every aspect of it in this lengthy essay. Engaging and often fun, the book takes us from the labs where scientists are exploring the genes that control aging, to brain-computer interface demonstrations where paralyzed people are learning to control artificial limbs with their minds. Whether we do it with biology or machines, it's likely that humans will artificially enhance our longevity at some point. Though the prospect of doubling our life expectancy seems crazy to some, Duncan argues it's not entirely implausible. Especially given how far we've come over the past century. 

Still, ethical questions plague the project. While researching his book, Duncan ran a survey online and in his lectures where he asked people if they would like to live beyond the standard 80 years. Most said no, though a significant minority said they wouldn't mind living to be 120 or 164. Those yearning to be immortal represented less than one percent of respondents. Many people felt that living longer than 80 years would mean depleting the Earth's resources even more quickly than we already are. Others worried that young people would have no chance at getting good jobs, since their elders could keep working for decades longer. Some simply felt that living for a long time would be depressing and boring.

Several sections of the book are devoted to Duncan's quest to understand how it would change humanity if we could live much longer than we do now. From the rational world of tissue engineering labs where researchers hope to use 3D printers to make healthy, new organs, he ventures into Singularity University where would-be immortals from Silicon Valley listen eagerly to longevity advocate Aubrey De Gray's prediction that the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born. These true believers imagine that science will solve our energy problems and economic difficulties long before overpopulation due to immortality becomes a planet-destroying problem.

As if acknowledging the mostly unscientific nature of the longevity project, Duncan explores its implications by discussing mythology and science fiction about immortality. We may not know what role telomeres play in aging, but we certainly know that The Matrix and Terminator warn against using technology to enhance humans. Given the speculative nature of his topic, Duncan's forays into fiction make a lot of sense, and help provide a cultural frame for debates over longevity enhancement.

Here on Download the Universe, we often discuss how a particular e-book makes use of the medium, whether with enhanced images, video, or even just a good set of links out to more sources. But with When I'm 164, I'd like to talk about a stylistic quirk of e-books that has nothing to do with format: the fact that it's become standard practice for online writing to include a lot of first-person, confessional storytelling. 

Should online writing always be personal? Certainly it's refreshing that online writers try to avoid some of the print media's fake objectivity. But should that always mean authors need to personalize their subjects?

Like a lot of longreads online, Duncan's book veers into the personal. He delves into his sadness at his parents' impending deaths, interviews both them and one of his sons about their views on life extension, and ultimately concludes the book by declaring that he's emotionally torn by the idea of living forever. In some ways, the climax of the book is Duncan's final declaration of ambivalence about scientifically enhanced longevity. I think this personal touch works in some ways -- it helps to draw the reader in, and acknowledges the highly personal responses that many people have to this area of research.  

But it often reads as cheesy and unnecessary, as if Duncan were just going through the motions of making his online writing more personal than print.  Of course it's easy to sympathize with his sadness at a parent's decline, but there is nothing particularly insightful or unusual to Duncan's first-person stories about these issues. He paints the scientists and thinkers he's consulted for this book in far more interesting detail than he paints himself. The first person bits just weren't necessary to make this story compelling.

Duncan is at his best when coaxing out intriguing speculations from scientists, engineers and philosophers about their views on life extension. Duncan's observations of their work form the meat of this extremely gripping tale about one possible future -- of enhanced longevity -- that could arise from contemporary medical science.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (coming in May 2013 from Doubleday).

Behind the scenes with "Electric Shock," Matter's new ebook on regeneration

"Electric Shock" by Cynthia Graber. Published by Matter. $0.99. Available online and for Kindle, iPad, and others.

by Seth Mnookin

Last spring, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, a pair of British journalists who'd written for everywhere from The New York Times and The Guardian to Economist and Wired, announced their intention to launch Matter. It felt, to many of us in the science-writing racket, like a quixotic effort: Was there really pent-up demand for in-depth, independent reportage that covered breaking news about science within the parameters of long-form non-fiction?

To answer 'yes' to that question required ignoring decades-long secular trends in journalism. Legacy news organizations ranging from CNN to my hometown paper, The Boston Globe, have been jettisoning specialized science reporters since the late 1990s. As profits disappeared and newsroom budgets shrank, "in-depth" projects became rarer and rarer. This is hardly a surprise. Nuanced, investigative reports have always been the equivalent of newsroom money pits: They require (relatively) highly paid reporters and editors, they don't produce a lot of copy relative to the amount of effort needed, and they don't typically deal with subjects advertisers want to be associated with. (Can you think of any companies that'd be eager to pitch their wares alongside this excellent Times series on the abuse of developmentally disabled patients in New York State group homes? Me neither.)

Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details. 

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.

The Most Ingenious Book: How to Rediscover Micrographia

Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made With Magnifying Glasses With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. By Robert Hooke. Originally published 1665. Project Gutenberg (web), Linda Hall Libary (web), Google Books (free), National Library of Medicine (flash web site, Turn the Pages App [free])

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

In January 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he stayed up till two in the morning reading a best-selling page-turner, a work that he called "the most ingenious book I read in my life." It was not a rousing history of English battles or a proto-bodice ripper. It was filled with images: of fleas, of bark, of the edges of razors.

The book was called Micrographia. It provided the reading public with its first look at the world beyond the naked eye. Its author, Robert Hooke, belonged to a brilliant circle of natural philosophers who--among many other things--were the first in England to make serious use of microscopes as scientific instruments. They were great believers in looking at the natural world for themselves rather than relying on what ancient Greek scholars had claimed. Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect's compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of. A razor's edge became a mountain range. In the chambers of a piece of bark, Hooke saw the first evidence of cells.