Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 105

Getting More Viral Every Day

[image error]In tomorrow's New York Times, I dig up some of the fossil viruses that have been buried in our genome for tens of millions of years.

This is a subject I've explored here on the Loom before (1, 2), but now is a great time to stop and take stock of just how much progress scientists have made in exhuming the ancient invaders that helped make us what we are.

There was one dimension of this research that I didn't have space to describe, but it's too cool to let go unmentioned. In the article, I...

Blind Ants, Traffic Jams, and the Pixies

Here's a talk by Ian Couzin, a scientist who does fascinating studies on crowds and their wisdom. I wrote about Ian a couple years in the New York Times. It's funny now to actually see him in the virtual flesh. And to hear him talk about how much he loves the Pixies.

My God, It's Full of Blogs

Time for some livestreaming! At the end of this week I'll be heading to North Carolina to Scienceonline 2010, a confab about all things scientific on the Tubes. I'm going to be talking in a session on Saturday morning at 10:15 am called "Rebooting Science Journalism In the Age of the Web" along with fellow rebooters Ed Yong,  John Timmer, and David Dobbs. You can watch live on UStream and Second Life. Later, our session (and all the others) will end up where everything ends up sooner or...

Quick Reminder: Science Writing Workshop Later This Month

Science grad students can still register for my science writing workshop. Course outline and registration here: http://bit.ly/6lh3B8 It will meet 1/25 and 2/1. The workshop will be at Yale, but non-Yale grad students are welcome to get in touch about attending, too.

Our Little Green Lungs

In my latest podcast, I speak to Penny Chisholm, an MIT microbiologist who studies the marine microbes make a lot of the oxygen on which we survive, and sees the ocean as a giant sea of virus-shuffled genes for harvesting sunlight. Check it out.

The Origin of the Future: Death by Mutation?

Last month I wrote an essay about the future of evolution for Science. I paid particularly close attention to what will happen to our own species, describing some recent research and ideas from scientists. Natural selection will not stop, nor will the emergence of new, neutral mutations.

But this week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our...

Books For the Dumped

[image error]Parasite Rex has made a very special list of books to read after you get dumped. To quote from Lemondrop over at the AOL collective:

Do you need something to so totally fill you with paranoia and fear that you can't even think about the worm that just dumped you? How about a terrifying book about worms! AGH! You'll never walk barefoot in the street again, plus you'll be so full of disgusting factoids that you won't even have time to mention what's-his-name at a party — you'll be too busy...

Evolving Viruses To Death

This fall, I gave a number of lectures about the evolution of swine flu. By the time I got to the end of the talk, I could tell that a lot of people in the audience were feeling a bit resigned, given the way evolution allows viruses like the flu to evade our best attacks. (Here's the full video of my lecture at the University of British Columbia.)

To try to cheer up the crowd, I'd offer a note of hope–the notion that we could turn the evolution of viruses against them, by pushing them into...

Calvin and the Cosmos [Science Tattoo]

Emily writes, "Ever since I was a kid, I have had a love for astronomy. I studied Earth and Planetary Sciences in college and am now in graduate school, studying to be a middle school science teacher. Another love I had as a kid was reading Calvin and Hobbes. My science tattoo combines these two childhood loves — with Calvin and Hobbes looking up at the 8 planetary symbols and the symbols for a star and water. Just like Calvin and Hobbes, I will always be gazing up at the sky with wonder and ...

Saving Tasmanian Devils From A New Form of Life–Themselves

Tasmanian devils have given rise to a weird new quasi-form of life: a cancer that spreads from animal to animal like a parasite. In tomorrow's New York Times, I report on the latest analysis of devil's facial tumour disease, published in this week's Science. Scientists have now tracked down the cancer to its progenitor: nerve cells known as Schwann cells.

Now scientists can use this evolutionary history to design diagnostic tests for the cancer and perhaps even vaccines. Let's hope they...