Jeffrey Marlow on Muck Rack

Jeffrey Marlow

  • Assistant Professor, Biology at Boston University
Boston
As seen in: Color Research & Application, Nature, The Mail on Sunday, WIRED Magazine, PNAS, Scientific American, Slate, The New Yorker, Discover Magazine, Genetic Literacy Project and
Assistant Professor of Biology at Boston University ::: Science Journalist / Communicator ::: Explorer @NatGeo ::: Founder @AdAstraScience
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Articles by Jeffrey Marlow

How to Poison an Ocean

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Reader Supported News
Trump envisions a new era of offshore oil drilling. Scientists know all too well how that story ends. In September, 2009, Erik Cordes, a deep-sea biologist, sat in a dark control room aboard the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, which was floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Fourteen hundred metres beneath him, a remotely operated vehicle (R.O.V.) was transmitting live video and data from the Mississippi Canyon lease area, a region just southeast of Louisiana that has long been pursued by oil companies.
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How to Poison an Ocean

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| The New Yorker Verified
In September, 2009, Erik Cordes, a deep-sea biologist, sat in a dark control room aboard the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, which was floating in the Gulf of Mexico. Fourteen hundred metres beneath him, a remotely operated vehicle (R.O.V.) was transmitting live video and data from the Mississippi Canyon lease area, a region just southeast of Louisiana that has long been pursued by oil companies. At first, the video feed showed little more than brown mud pockmarked by burrowing worms and snails.
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The Dark Frontier: Unlocking the Secrets of the Deep Sea

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Literary Review Verified
The trouble with the deep sea is that it is dark and very far away. This is not the realm of glorious pink coral reefs surrounded by bewitching tropical fish. All of that lives in the light. In the depths – and in this book Jeffrey Marlow, a specialist in deep-sea microbes, goes very deep – things are different. For a start, many of the life forms which reside in the depths are indeed microbes and, in Marlow’s words, ‘all pretty much roundish blobs, even under a microscope’. How deep is deep?
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Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor - Nature Geoscience

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By Andrew K. Sweetman, Alycia Smith, Daniëlle de Jonge, Tobias Hahn, Peter Schroedl, Michael Silverstein, R. Edwards, Clare Woulds, William B. Homoky, Andrea Koschinsky, Sebastian H. Fuchs, Thomas Kuhn Verified, Franz Geiger, Jeffrey Marlow, Claire Andrade, Alastair J. M. Lough
| Nature Verified
Abstract Deep-seafloor organisms consume oxygen, which can be measured by in situ benthic chamber experiments. Here we report such experiments at the polymetallic nodule-covered abyssal seafloor in the Pacific Ocean in which oxygen increased over two days to more than three times the background concentration, which from ex situ incubations we attribute to the polymetallic nodules.
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Targeting Microhabitats for Life Detection and Biological Investigations

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By Michael J. Malaska, Jeffrey Marlow, Heather Graham
| agu.confex.com
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The Inside Story of the U.N. High Seas Treaty Original

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| The New Yorker Verified
For the past five years, under the auspices of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, nearly two hundred nations have been haggling over the best way to change that. They agreed that the marine life of the high seas needed legal protection, in the form of a treaty—but how, exactly, might that protection be provided?
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Undersea Internet Cables Can Detect Earthquakes-and May Soon Warn of Tsunamis Original

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| The New Yorker Verified
On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that beamed an ultra-stable laser through underground fibre-optic cables. It was part of a larger effort to build one of the world’s most accurate clocks, capable of measuring time to the nearest quintillionth of a second. Almost a thousand miles away from his native Italy, Marra did not feel the quake, but he heard about it on the news.
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Shedding Light on Untouchable Sea Creatures Original

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| The New Yorker Verified
The seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus, weighs as much as a person and haunts deep, dark waters from New Zealand to Brazil and British Columbia. So few people have seen this creature alive that researchers must study it in death—typically, as a mound of purplish flesh that washes ashore or turns up in a net. A living seven-arm octopus was scooped up by a Norwegian fishing trawler in 1984, but “when laid on deck the body collapsed,” a local zoologist wrote at the time.
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Spatially-resolved correlative microscopy and microbial identification reveals dynamic depth- and mineral-dependent anabolic activity in salt marsh sediment

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Rachel L. Spietz, Keun-Young Kim, Imaging Research
| biorxiv.org
New Results View ORCID ProfileJeffrey Marlow, Rachel Spietz, Keun-Young Kim, Mark Ellisman, Peter Girguis, Roland Hatzenpichler doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.03.234146 Abstract Coastal salt marshes are key sites of biogeochemical cycling and ideal systems in which to investigate the community structure of complex microbial communities.
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Giant Virus Found in Sewage Blurs the Line Between Life and Non-Life

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
In most biology textbooks, there’s a clear separation between the three domains of cellular organisms — Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes — and viruses. This fault line is also typically accepted as the divider between life and non-life: Since viruses rely on host machinery to enact metabolic transformations and to replicate, they are not self-sufficient, and generally not considered living entities. But several discoveries of giant viruses over the last decade have blurred this distinction.
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The Rich, Frightening Diversity of the Bat "Virome"

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Viral pandemics are one of the most fundamental, frightening threats to human health: They can emerge seemingly from nowhere, and spread like wildfire through the hyperconnected conduits of our globalized society. And while near-annual crises prompt reconsideration of local, regional, and global responses, preventing viral induction and spread in the first place represents another important area of focus. Hence the pervasive suspicion of bats — the most notorious of viral transmission agents.
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Inside the High-Stakes World of Vaccine Development

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Vaccines are widely recognized as the most effective way we’ve got to fight infectious disease, a bulwark against a staggeringly diverse array of potentially pathogenic organisms looking to circumvent our defenses. Pervasive vaccines like those for influenza, measles, or polio offer a sense of security, but it wasn’t always so, and a range of established and emerging threats continue to present real problems.
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Giant Virus Found in Sewage Blurs the Line Between Life and Non-Life

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
In most biology textbooks, there’s a clear separation between the three domains of cellular organisms – Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes – and viruses. This fault line is also typically accepted as the divider between life and non-life: since viruses rely on host machinery to enact metabolic transformations and to replicate, they are not self-sufficient, and generally not considered living entities. But several discoveries of giant viruses over the last decade have blurred this distinction.
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The Daunting Search for the Next Deadly Pathogen

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Thomas Zeller Verified
| UNDARK Verified
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, teams of researchers are busy looking for the next deadly virus. The odds are not in their favor.
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Exploring the Oceans by Remote Control

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| The New Yorker Verified
Streaming video is making deep-sea research easier—and shifting the meaning of our journeys into the unknown. Illustration by Jasu Hu By Jeffrey Marlow May 28, 2019 Streaming video is making deep-sea research easier—and shifting the meaning of our journeys into the unknown. Illustration by Jasu Hu In 2015, Melissa Omand, a thirty-four-year-old oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, began preparing for a six-day research expedition.
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Negotiations continue for Biodiversity Protection in the High Seas

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Aria Ritz Finkelstein
| dsmobserver.com
From March 25th to April 5th, hundreds of delegates gathered at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan to continue work on one of the most consequential ocean-based treaty negotiations in recent memory. It was the second of four planned intergovernmental conference sessions to establish a new, legally binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity on the high seas, in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
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A Whale’s Afterlife

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| The New Yorker Verified
In the late two-thousands, Rouse and Eddie Kisfaludy, then an operations manager for Virgin Oceanic, had begun meeting with officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the city of San Diego to pitch an alternative approach to the disposal of dead whales. Often, whales that wash up on shore are hauled to landfills or pushed back into the water. Rouse and Kisfaludy wanted to tow one out to sea, sink it to the seafloor, and watch what happened.
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Women in Microbiology

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Graciela Brelles-Mariño, John Spear, Katherine McMahon
| asmscience.org
Tales of Extraordinary Female Scientists Many girls want to become scientists when they grow up, just like many boys do. But for these girls, the struggle to do what they love and to be treated with respect has been much harder because of the discrimination and bias in our society. In Women in Microbiology, we meet women who, despite these obstacles and against tough odds, have become scientific leaders and revered mentors.
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How Cooperating Microbes Shaped Life on Earth

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Rogier Braakman
| Scientific American Verified
Microbial partnerships turn out to be more common and influential than scientists could have ever imagined Half a mile below the surface of the ocean, off the coast of Oregon, the Alvin submersible's headlights flicker on to reveal a colorful oasis. Plush carpets of white, yellow and orange microbes cover the seafloor, punctuated by fields of clams and mussels. Red rockfish watch the vessel warily with bulbous milky eyes, while bubble plumes belch from mounds of chalky, variegated rock.
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Scientific American Volume 319, Issue 5

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By Ken Paller, Delphine Oudiette, Jeffrey Marlow, Rogier Braakman
| Scientific American Verified
Credit: Hannah Whitaker Current Issue Scientific American November 2018 Volume 319, Issue 5 Purchase To Read MoreFeaturesDepartments From the Editor Letters Advances Forum The Science of Health The Science Agenda TechnoFiles Recommended Skeptic Anti Gravity 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago Graphic SciencePurchase To Read MoreExpertise. Insights. Illumination. Discover world-changing science. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. Subscribe Now!
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Women in Microbiology

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Graciela Brelles-Mariño, John Spear, Katherine McMahon
| asmscience.org
Many girls want to become scientists when they grow up, just like many boys do. But for these girls, the struggle to do what they love and to be treated with respect has been much harder because of the discrimination and bias in our society. In Women in Microbiology, we meet women who, despite these obstacles and against tough odds, have become scientific leaders and revered mentors.
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Harnessing a methane‐fueled, sediment‐free mixed microbial community for utilization of distributed sources of natural gas

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Amit Kumar, Brandon C. Enalls, Linda M. Reynard
| Color Research & Application Verified
To inform the conditions needed for the initial biochemical transformations in this multipartite system, we identify salinity and temperature conditions needed for optimized methane consumption in natural sediment mesocosms, and evaluate the changes in microbial community structure associated with heightened methane consumption and sulfide production rates.
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The High Seas Are Being Exploited. Exploration Must Keep Pace.

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| UNDARK Verified
In 2014, a 300-pound metal contraption was lowered 6 miles beneath the waves of the western Pacific Ocean, through the dark waters of the deepest gash in the Earth’s crust. When it set down near the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a plume of chalky sediment billowed outward, and rich odors attracted rare species of crustaceans to a baited trap.
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Giant Crustaceans, Possible Alzheimer's Drug Among Findings from James Cameron's Deep Sea Expedition

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| WIRED Magazine Verified
In March of this year, filmmaker, explorer, and high-profile tinkerer James Cameron etched his name in the record books when he became the first man to pilot a solo submarine to the world’s deepest ocean trench. During a full-house presentation to the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Cameron and his team of scientists presented some initial results from the expedition.
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Is Snowmaking the Most Impressive Olympic Performance?

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| WIRED Magazine Verified
When all is said and done at the end of the Olympic Winter Games, one remarkable performance will go unrewarded: the snowmaking. Insufficient snow is a problem that has plagued recent winter sports competitions, and there's no end in sight during this contemporary age of climate change. But as the Anthropocene taketh, it may also giveth, as improved production of artificial snow makes up for nature's stunted snowfall.
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Inside North Korea’s Subway System

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| WIRED Magazine Verified
Hundreds of feet beneath the world’s most insular capital city lies a network of cavernous rooms, adorned with stone pillars and grandiose mosaics. This is the Pyongyang Metro, one of North Korea’s most ambitious public works projects. For public transportation infrastructure aficionados – and you know who you are – the Pyongyang Metro is an eagerly sought grail; for the rest of us, it’s a peek into the daily commute of the North Korea’s privileged capital-dwellers.
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What Is a Greenland Shark Doing in the Gulf of Mexico?

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| WIRED Magazine Verified
When a half-dozen researchers recently ventured into the Gulf of Mexico to investigate the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on marine life, they certainly weren’t expecting to find a polar shark. And yet, there it was, among the 44 species characterized during the 1,750-mile journey of the RV Apalachee : a 12-foot-long Greenland Shark.
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Why You Aren't as Creative as You'd Like to Think

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| WIRED Magazine Verified
You’re a smart person: a believer in science, an acolyte of technology, a 21st century citizen. So answer this: Could you, and you alone, make something as simple as a pencil? Mark Pagel doesn’t think so. In a presentation at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin, the evolutionary biologist offered this very thought experiment - pencil manufacturing, after all, involves graphite mining and refining, wood harvesting and processing, machining, rubber harvesting, and many other intricate processes.
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New Life for the L.A. River

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| WIRED Magazine Verified
In 1769, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola rode his horse across a wide plain punctuated with rolling hills leading to a half ring of sharp peaks. Portola, as the governor of Baja and Alta California, was on an expedition to extend the Spanish influence northward, scouting potential locations for missions and towns.
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The Virus Hunters

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Scientific American Verified
Kimpese, a mid-sized town in southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo, rings with a cheerful melody as the thumping bass of café sound systems mixes with the chatter from vendors selling bright fruits and soft fabrics. Against the background of this everyday chorus, it’s almost impossible to hear the tall man with grey-tinged stubble, standing beneath the overhang of a single-story, freshly painted building, talking to the bats overhead.
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The Virus Hunters

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Thomas Zeller Verified
| UNDARK Verified
Kimpese, a mid-sized town in southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo, rings with a cheerful melody as the thumping bass of café sound systems mixes with the chatter from vendors selling bright fruits and soft fabrics. Against the background of this everyday chorus, it’s almost impossible to hear the tall man with grey-tinged stubble, standing beneath the overhang of a single-story, freshly painted building, talking to the bats overhead.
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The Coral Microbiome May Offer Protection in Warming Seas

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Corals, like these in American Samoa, could be protected by their microbiome. (Image: Zack Gold and Lupita Ruiz-Jones) Ofu Island – a speck of land emerging from the southwest Pacific Ocean – is a textbook paradise. Jagged, forest-covered peaks rise steeply from palm-fringed white sand beaches, as colorful birds sound off in the distance. But beneath the waves, it’s a different story: Ofu Island’s coral reefs are suffering.
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Opinion: Telepresence is a potentially transformative tool for field science

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By Jeffrey Marlow, Colleen Hoffman, Chiara Borrelli, Sean P. Jungbluth
| PNAS Verified
Field expeditions have long played a critical role in advancing our understanding of the natural world. From the voyage of the Beagle to the HMS Challenger Expedition and the Apollo Moon landings, researchers have visited remote locations to collect samples and in situ data before returning to the laboratory for further analyses.Fig. 1. By allowing scientists in remote locations to engage with a network of experts in real time, telepresence could have a transformative effect on field science.
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Fighting Cancer with Engineered Microbes

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Tal Danino explores the diversity of the microbial world through synthetic biology and artistic projects, like “Microuniverse,” above. (Image: Ana Pantelic) Bacteria are – like nearly every other life form – social beings, responding to their neighbors and surroundings in intricate ways. Modifying metabolism based on nearby organisms allows single celled creatures to have outsized impact, by making extensive biofilms or swarming to degrade a new food source, for example.
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Giant Virus Found in Sewage Blurs the Line Between Life and Non-Life - The Extremo Files

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
« “The First Green”: Ancient Life Inspires Modern Art Fighting Cancer with Engineered Microbes » An artist’s rendition of the newly discovered Klosneuvirus (Image: NIH / Ella Maru studio) In most biology textbooks, there’s a clear separation between the three domains of cellular organisms – Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes – and viruses.
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"The First Green": Ancient Life Inspires Modern Art

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
“The First Green” at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. (Image: Ana Pantelic) Every morning at Hamelin Pool, in Western Australia, the first rays of sunshine illuminate knobby reef-like structures, submerged or peeking just above the gentle waves, depending on the tide. On the crudely rounded surfaces of these rocks, microorganisms stir and begin the daily task of photosynthesizing, fighting against occluding sand grains to harvest the sunlight.
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Why Aren't All Members of a Species the Same? Exploring the Pangenome

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Individual microbes of the same species often have a lot of different genes. But why? (Image: NIAID) Prochlorococcus marinus are diminutive organisms. At less than a micrometer across, these photosynthesizing microbes may be small, but they’re plentiful – by many accounts one of the most abundant species on the planet. But that’s not quite the full story: like any other member of the same species, no two P. marinus individuals are genetically identical. What’s remarkable is how different they may be.
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The Slow Life Movement: A Microbial Perspective of the Subsurface Biosphere

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Seafloor sediment is home to a vast repository of slow-growing, slow-evolving microbes. (Image: NOAA) On the seafloor, “marine snow” is constantly falling. Bits of dead plankton, decaying fecal material, biological remnants from shore – it all finds its way to the bottom of the ocean, delivering needed sources of organic molecules and energy to the microbial communities lying in wait. Over time, this snow – along with sediment mineral grains – accumulates, burying previous layers.
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Could Life's Earliest Stages Have Survived Without a Key Ingredient?

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
During the early Earth’s heavy bombardment, could metabolism have started without phosphate, one of life’s key ingredients? (Image: NASA/Simone Marchi) “CHNOPS” is one of science’s most revered acronyms, an amalgamation of letters that rolls of the tongues of high school biology students and practicing researchers alike. It accounts for the six elements that comprise most biological molecules: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur.
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The Forgotten Domain of the Gut Microbiome

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Which microbes could be helping this mountain gorilla digest its food? (Image: Jeffrey Marlow) Over the last few years, the range of known organisms living in the human gut – that complex milieu of microbes known as the microbiome – has expanded dramatically. They influence your health, your appearance, and your behavior in largely unknown ways, and yet, despite the thousands of studies that have been published on the subject, the microbiome census may be woefully incomplete.
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Lighter, Faster, Cheaper: Broadening Access to the Deep Sea - The Extremo Files

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Many island nations have deep water within an hour’s boat ride from shore; here, a view of Gatokae Island in the Solomon Islands is taken over water that is at least 1000 meters deep and known to be volcanically active. (Image: Alex DeCiccio) Most countries on Earth have no way to access vast portions of their sovereign territory.
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Scientists Narrow in on Landing Site for NASA's Next Mars Rover

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
A crater at Northeast Syrtis, one of the shortlisted landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover. (Image: NASA/HiRISE/University of Arizona) The Curiosity Mars rover is in the prime of its robotic life, approaching dramatic layered deposits on the slopes of Mt. Sharp. But even as the four and a half year-old mission reaches the features it was initially sent to investigate, scientists and engineers are feverishly planning for the next rover mission, Mars 2020.
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Colliding Molecules in Mars' Atmosphere May Solve an Ancient Climate Mystery

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Features on Mars like this one, a likely river delta deposit, point to a warmer ancient past. (Image: NASA/JPL) Climate change on Earth is a well-established phenomenon, but scientists have long struggled to explain an even more dramatic change of conditions, long ago in a far-off land. Mars is a dry, frigid planet today, with an average ground temperature of about -60 °C.
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Rogue Actors and the Coming Space Law Crisis

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
A night launch for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. (Image: Flickr/SpaceX) Launching rockets into space has traditionally been the domain of nation states: only a handful of countries over the last several decades have mounted the technical expertise and financial resources to put payloads in orbit.
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Prepare for the Future or Grow While You Can? Biology's Central Dilemma

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Plants and other organisms are finely tuned to grow quickly or maintain a large genome, and phosphorous limitation demands a choice (Image: Flickr/Salvatore Vastano). Natural selection is a rigorous master, demanding tough choices and efficiency of all living organisms. Even when things are good and the living is easy, trade-offs are required.
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Sampling the Slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro to Tackle one of Biology's Biggest Questions

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Quantifying plant and animal diversity on Africa’s tallest mountain (Image: Flickr/Ninara). Take a look outside your window. How many species do you see? This question of how geography influences biodiversity has bedeviled biologists for centuries. But according to a new study led by Marcell Peters from the University of Wurzburg, the number of distinct species you’re seeing – or, more accurately, the number you would see in the nearest natural environment – depends most strongly on temperature.
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Why Are You Awake Right Now? Protein Modifications and Circadian Rhythm

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Modifications to proteins help regulate the body’s response to changing light levels and other diurnal signals (Image: Flickr/John Flannery). After waking up this morning, your body began a well-established set of procedures to prepare for the day: heart rate ramped up, body temperature increased, and hormone levels shifted. And tonight, you’ll probably start to feel sleepy around the same time you did last night, as other physiological changes start to take place.
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Understanding Pluto's Icy 'Heart'

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
A cocktail of reflective ices forms Pluto’s heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia (Image: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI) When NASA’s New Horizons mission flew by Pluto last year, it sent back images that recalled a past era – a time when a few photos of initial reconnaissance could drastically change our sense of an entire celestial body. For The Moon and Mars, these initial glimpses happened decades ago; satellites of the gas giants, like Europa, Enceladus, and Titan were ready for their close-ups next.
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The Limits of Life Beneath Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vents

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
A recent research study examined microbial life beneath deep sea hydrothermal vents. (Image: NOAA) How hot is too hot for life to survive? Ever since microbes were discovered squirming around in hydrothermal springs several decades ago, the limit of heat-loving (thermophilic) organisms has been a moving target.
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Finding Mars on Earth: Chilean Hot Springs Provide New Clues to a Martian Mystery

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By Jeffrey Marlow
| Discover Magazine Verified
Geysers of El Tatio, Chile. (Image: Wikimedia Commons) In 2007, the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit came across a slightly raised platform, roughly pentagonal in shape and 90 meters across, which scientists named Home Plate. The rocky outcrop had a base of solidified ash, with nearby deposits of gas-filled basalts. Next to the plateau, nubby, nodular chunks of rock showed up, and light-colored soil just beneath the surface was exposed by the rover’s wheels.
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