I'm back at last from the west coast leg of the Microcosm tour. Portland had a cloudy, melancholy charm, and at Powell's I gave a reading in front of a collection of hand-made black velvet paintings from the nearby Velveteria. When the audience's eyes drifted off of me, I couldn't tell if they were lost in thought or distracted by Jimi Hendrix or a smoking clown. The next day I headed for San Francisco, where I talked to Moira Gunn for her show Tech Nation (link to come). Then I had lunch with Kirsten Sanford, who will be interviewing me on tomorrow's edition of This Week In Science. Then off to Santa Cruz, to talk to Robert Pollie at KUSP for his show Talk of the Bay (link to come). Finally I made my way over to Kepler's in Menlo Park. I spoke there a few years ago, and since then they closed and were saved by the community. I was glad to be able to come back. In the morning I flew to Seattle. I headed for Microsoft Research to give a talk, which I'm told will be online before long. I was a little spooked by the experience, because, in addition to the lunchtime crowd in the room, there were lots of people watching online elsewhere--in some cases in other countries. I had to resist the instinct to talk very loudly so that people over in China could hear me. Then I made a quick appearance on KOMO, the ABC affiliate in Seattle. The anchor started talking about E. coli in hamburger and spinach, and I responded by describing the billions of E. coli in her. I saw her eyes widen a little in what I'm guessing was supressed horror, but she handled it like a pro. Finally I went to Town Hall and waited for intrepid souls to wade through the downpours to hear me talk. It was great to see familiar faces (like this mug). I met blogger Geoff Arnold, who showed me Microcosm on Kindle, and since I couldn't autograph his screen, he took a picture. (I think Town Hall will also be posting my talk--will update.) Along the way, I wrote a blog post about some new advances in the research I describe in Microcosm. The response was terrific (thanks in part to a link from reddit), and the comments have been multiplying faster than E. coli on a warm day. There were a few questions that came up that I thought I'd address in follow up. --First off, the paper itself is finally online now. --Matt asks
how are they sure this citrate eating adaptation was a result of mutations, and not, say, an existing sequence of dna that was just locked in an intron or something, and then eventually shuffled to a coding region of the genome? Could they follow the genetic changes point by point, or are they still trying to figure that out?
