Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 107

A Glint From Across The Solar System

I know that this is Bad Astronomy's usual bailiwick, but I had to post this. It's a glint of sunlight reflecting off the surface of a lake of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, a moon of Saturn. When I look at it, I wonder what diesel-fueled creatures might be swimming below.  More details here.

The Speed of Thought

[image error]How is your brain like a telegraph? Check out my latest column in Discover for the answer.

Tangled Bank: Read the Excerpt And Then Stuff That Stocking!

The National Center For Science Education (now at its new ncse.com address) is offering a free pdf of a chapter from my book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. The chapter, called "Radiations and Extinctions," is about the two sides of biodiversity. First I look at how biodiversity rises over time (the ascent of the animal kingdom, for example, and the wild exuberance of insects). Then I look at how biodiversity falls, thanks to background extinctions and mass extinctions. And t...

Spiderman's Bats

This spring I blogged about some marvelous videos made by scientists at Brown University in their quest to understand how bats manage to be bats. Turning your hands into membrane-lined wings makes for some awkward trade-offs. Moving around on the ground, for example, gets to be a special challenge. Bats have not simply evolved a single solution to these trade-offs, however. Instead, they've explored lots of different compromises. While many bats can only creep awkwardly on the ground, for...

Happy Slothy Holidays

Carl Buell, who illustrated many lovely critters for my new book The Tangled Bank, has been adding some new paintings to his Flickr stream. Here's his holiday ground sloth.

In the caption, he writes: "I've certainly drawn and painted enough of them over the past 15 years. Ground sloths are a favorite subject. Too big to hide from the weather, this big guy just hunkered down and slept through the storm. It's hard to imagine these guys in snow, but Megalonyx ranged as far north as Alaska...

Darwin Gets Swine Flu: The YouTube Edition

This fall I gave a number of talks about the flu, and how evolutionary biologists are helping to make sense of this vexing virus. The University of British Columbia, where I spoke in November, has posted the lecture I gave there on YouTube. For ease of viewing, I've embedded all six segments of the talk below.

A few caveats. A couple labels got lost in the conversion of my Keynote to Powerpoint during the preparation of the video. And the numbers I gave for the 2009 H1N1 flu are now a bit out ...

Preserving A Moth [Science Tattoo]

Hannah Rosa writes: "I am a Science teacher in Central London. My tattoo is part of the Ext-inked project and my endangered species is the narrow bordered bee hawk moth. I decided to sign up for the project as I have worked closely with endangered species in the field as part of my degree studies and understand the importance of closely monitoring and preventing the extinction of these species. I wanted to become a life long ambassador so that I can educate others about the impacts of...

Amherst Gets Infected This Friday

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.

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Multi-Layered Fact-Checking Process, Activate!

Did the new Post op-ed by Sarah Palin on global warming get the same multi-layered fact-checking as George Will? Sigh. Deltoid has the details.

Pandemic in a Petri Dish

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.