Carl Zimmer's Blog
December 9, 2009
I will be speaking at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on Friday. It will be my final lecture on evolution this year–the last of nine (whew). They don't call it the Year of Darwin for nothing…
Here are the details. It's free and open to the public, so I hope to see you there.
December 8, 2009
My latest podcast is about the ways viruses jump the species fence and give rise to new diseases. I talk to evolutionary biologist Paul Turner, who runs experiments in which viruses evolve to attack new hosts. Plus, how viruses have sex and why.
For more on Turner's work, here's an article I wrote about him a few years back.
This is good. Parasites have made it to the Colbert Report. It's no secret that Stephen Colbert is a modern sort of Mr. Wizard (see his stuff on electromagnetism, microbes, and naming new species of spiders). Now Colbert introduces the nation, nay, the world, to a fish parasite that plays the part of the fish tongue.
I must, however, correct one thing Colbert said. This parasite has been in the news recently thanks to some awesome photographs of a recently caught infected fish. But that...
December 7, 2009
In 2010 I will be teaching two short courses on science writing, one on land and one at sea.
1. At Yale, I will be teaching my fourth annual workshop for science graduate students next month. It consists of two 2-hour sessions. All the gory details, including how to register, are here.
2. This summer I will be back on Appledore Island to teach a week-long science writing class at the Shoals Marine Lab. The picture shows my classroom from summer 2009.
Here's the course page.
Here's a post about l...
December 6, 2009
Long-time readers of this blog will be aware of my Ahab-like obsession with George Will's global warming errors in the Washington Post–and the Post's hollow claims to have carefully fact-checked him. I confess that I've let a couple of his more recent columns slip by. But I had to stop to blog about his latest take on global warming, in which he jumps on the recently stolen emails among climate scientists. He does a remarkable job of making no sense at all.
In case you haven't followed it...
December 3, 2009
November 30, 2009
Over the summer, I posted a list of words I banned from my science writing class at Shoals Marine Lab. Readers offered some equally abysmal suggestions. And this fall, teaching a seminar at Yale, I came across some others. I suspect that this list is just going to keep growing. So I'm giving the list a home here, where I can add in new entries as they arise.
By assembling this list, I don't mean to say that no one should ever use these words. What I mean is that anyone who wants to learn how t...
