If you are anything at all like me, you are a big fan of the 1980s TV series, Cosmos, featuring Carl Sagan, the astronomer/story teller, and his wife Ann Druyan, the writer. This extraordinary collection of stories told by Sagan while at the helm of an imaginary space vehicle whisked us off into deep space every week with a new adventure that was just a bit more spellbinding than the previous one. It's been 34 years since this remarkable series came to us via our television screens. To the credit of all those who made Cosmos possible, it still plays in many locations around the world.
Well, that series has been given a facelift, updated, and it has a new narrator in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. It airs on Fox TV beginning in March 2014. Tyson doesn't quite have the commanding presence of Carl Sagan, but he's close. He's bright, witty, imaginative, and with a sense of humor. He has a new collaborator in Seth McFarlane, who has been instrumental in introducing animation into the venture.
Science has languished in the past decade or so in America, and in global viewing audiences. This new series is intended to give our psyches and our imaginations a new shot of adrenaline. Will it rekindle that sense of awe and wonder in us, and awaken us to the need to push the limits of knowledge “out there” or inwardly to seek new frontiers and new possibilities? God, I hope so. Life on Earth has become dreadful, painful, and unimaginative in recent decades. Here is a glimpse of what is to come in Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey:
The symbiotic pattern of evolution is everywhere and allows us a very different and fascinating window into the way symbiotic viruses work, since all viruses are symbiotic, including those involved in our human reproduction.
Where do viruses, such as Ebola and HIV, come from and why they are so aggressive? This book changed tenets of evolutionary virology, developing the concepts of aggressive symbiosis and plague culling, which explain much of the horror of plague virus
