Farewell to 2014

In a break from journalistic tradition, I thought I’d actually put up an end-of-year list at the actual end of the year. I know! I promise to live less dangerously in 2015.

It’s been a good and gratifying year. I gave a TED talk, enjoyed my second year at National Geographic, and signed a deal to write a book about partnerships between animals and microbes–I Contain Multitudes, to be released in early 2016).

Sincere thanks to everyone who read or listened to something I did in 2014. Here is a list of the work that I’m proudest of.

Longer reads:

• The Unique Merger That Made You (and Ewe, and Yew). On the one freakish event that gave rise to all sophisticated life on the planet.
• How malaria defeats our drugs. On the race to stop drug-resistant malaria.
• There Is No ‘Healthy’ Microbiome. On the reality of the microbes that share our lives.
• Coincidental killers. On how some microbes kill us by accident.
• DIY diagnosis: how an extreme athlete uncovered her genetic flaw. On an extreme athlete who discovered the cause of her two genetic diseases.

Talks

• My TED talk on parasites
• An interview at NYU about science journalism
• My Story Collider story about meeting David Attenborough and questioning our heroes.

Blog posts

• Electric Eels Can Remotely Control Their Prey’s Muscles
• It’s Behind You! Robot Creates Feeling of Ghostly Presence
• Deinocheirus Exposed: Meet The Body Behind the Terrible Hand
• A Flood of Borrowed Genes at the Origins of Tiny Extremists
• Cave-Exploring Snake Robot Gets Inspiration From Sidewinders
• When You Move House, Your Microbial Aura Moves Too
• One Species Becomes Two, Inside an Insect
• You Almost Certainly Have Mites On Your Face
• Seals May Have Carried Tuberculosis To The New World
• A Swarm of a Thousand Cooperative, Self-Organising Robots
• Octopus Cares For Her Eggs For 53 Months, Then Dies
• Nature’s Most Amazing Eyes Just Got A Bit Weirder
• Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans
• One Lichen Species Is Actually 126, And Probably More
• The Barnacle That Eats Glowing Sharks
• Does Your Microbiological Age Match Your Biological One?
• The Silence of the Crickets, The Silence of the Crickets
• The Surprising Closest Relative of the Huge Elephant Birds
• Man-Made Electromagnetic Noise Disrupts a Bird’s Compass
• Where’s All The Animal Vagina Research?
• On Privilege and Luck, or Why Success Breeds Success
• The Most Versatile Impressionist In the Forest
• Sailfish Use Inescapable Face- Swords to Wound, Then Kill
• In This Insect, Females Have Penises And Males Have Vaginas
• The Tiny Culprit Behind A Graveyard of Ancient Whales
• Now This Is How You Find Disease Genes
• Study Of 1.5 Million Cows Shows Daughters Get More Milk Than Sons
• The Mantis Shrimp Sees Like A Satellite
• 80-Year-Old Vintage Snake Venom Can Still Kill
• In Saving A Species, You Might Accidentally Doom It