Slime

Informationen zum Autor Susanne Wedlich Klappentext A groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime that will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out. Slime. The very word seems to ooze oily menace, conjuring up a variety of unpleasant associations: mucous, toxins, reptiles, pollutants, and other unsavory viscous semi-liquid substances. Yet without slime, the natural world would be completely unrecognizable; in fact, life itself as we know it would be impossible In this deft and fascinating book, journalist Susanne Wedlich takes us on a tour of all things slimy, from the most unctuous of science fiction monsters to the biochemical compounds that are the very building blocks of life. Along the way she shows us what slime really means, and why slime is not something to fear, but rather something to ... embrace. Leseprobe Introduction Run Don't walk from the Blob! It crawls! It creeps! It eats you alive! - Trailer for The Blob, 1958 On a clear spring day, I make my way to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. It's located in a part of the university campus which has a whiff of Hogwarts about it, with a maze of courtyards, the entrance hiding somewhere within. The Hunterian is the oldest public museum in Scotland, more cabinet of curiosities than modern scientific institution. Roman artefacts, feathered Maori cloaks and fossils sit side by side in this museum, which reminds me of a church with its pointy gable and simple rosette glass window, the high ceiling worked in the same dark wood as the carved balustrades. But it's neither the neo-Gothic charm nor the wonderful collections that brought me to the Hunterian. I am here to see a glass bottle, about as big as a hand, fitted with a fat stopper and two gilded labels, handwritten. I'm here to see an old phial filled with slime. Some forms of matter seem to unite the properties of solids and liquids. For example, cats: which category do they fall into? The answer should be an easy one, physically speaking: solids retain their shape, while liquids fill their container. Cats seem unequivocally to be solids, until they demonstrate their aptitude for easily slipping into the smallest of gaps, almost flowing into them. The French physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin researched, tongue-in-cheek, the physical classification of cats between solid and liquid, touching on his specialist area of rheology, the study of the flow of matter. In 2017 he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, a not altogether serious award for suitably original research. Matter which exists somewhere between solid and liquid is not restricted to cats, though, and slime is its most important embodiment in nature. It is protean in its behaviour; it is the material of interfaces and has a unique place in our imaginations. We are all creatures of slime, but some of us are more creative than others: there is a menagerie of oozing organisms to be found in all the world's habitats, frequently changing these environments to suit their needs by leaving their glistening marks. It may also be a surprise to discover that microbes were not only the dominant, but also the only form of life on Earth for billions of years, with slime, as the éminence gluante , propping up their power and setting in motion processes across the globe which still shape it today. The long reign of slime concerns the supposedly boring stages of evolution which preceded the emergence of the first animals. Popular portrayals often neglect this seemingly endless span of time, but slime was paving the way for life on Earth then, particularly for higher organisms like us. It may even have facilitated our very existence. It is a legacy we humans prefer to ignore. Here, we benefit from slime's hidden nature, with its visible manifestations banished inside our bodi...

Auteur
Susanne Wedlich studied biology and political science in Munich and has worked as a writer in Boston and Singapore. She is currently a freelance science journalist for Der Spiegel, National Geographic and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. She lives in Munich.

Ayca Turkoglu is a literary translator from German and Turkish. She lives in North London.

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A groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime that will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out.

Slime. The very word seems to ooze oily menace, conjuring up a variety of unpleasant associations: mucous, toxins, reptiles, pollutants, and other unsavory viscous semi-liquid substances. Yet without slime, the natural world would be completely unrecognizable; in fact, life itself as we know it would be impossible

In this deft and fascinating book, journalist Susanne Wedlich takes us on a tour of all things slimy, from the most unctuous of science fiction monsters to the biochemical compounds that are the very building blocks of life. Along the way she shows us what slime really means, and why lime is not something to fear, but rather something to ... embrace.