The business of life is the business of taking the disorder of the world, little bits of matter scattered here and there, and giving them shape, regularity, order. Or so we all thought. Science journalist Carl Zimmer claims that at a microscopic level, in the inner workings of cells, the basic processes of life are actually extremely sloppy. So where and when is the disorder translated into order? Jad's friend, Little Wing Lee, stops by with two old cassettes of her late grandmother singing. Jad uses the process of noise filtering to coax her voice out of years of accumulated tape hiss. Could this be the perfect analogy for how life filters order out of randomness?

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Carl Zimmer, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life