Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 111
October 29, 2009
October 28, 2009
Congratulations, Magnetic Movie
I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Scientific Merit Award at the Imagine Science Film Festival, which just closed over the weekend. You may have seen the winner we picked, Magnetic Movie, which I've embedded below. There was a huge variety to choose from, some wonderfully beautiful, and some finding great emotional depth in just a few minutes. But Magnetic Movie, in the way it reveals the hidden weirdness that surrounds us, was tops.
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
October 26, 2009
Ten Evolution Picks For Nova
NOVA isn't just a great television series; it's also a formidable web site. (And, as with so many things media these days, it's hard to draw the line between the two.)
They've just launched an evolution-rich site, with information on their evolution-related shows and lots of other goodies. (As you can see, it's still beta.)
As part of the unveiling, NOVA asked me if I'd pick ten of the most important developments in evolutionary biology over the past decade. I came up with a...
Where I'll Be Talking (Now That I'm Conscious)
After weeks of manically scrubbing my hands with soap, Purel, and eye of newt, I ended up getting swine flu anyway. It's not terribly surprising, since my entire town seems to have become a Petri dish for the viruses this week. I find a stunning clarity to the flu–you don't feel a little sleep-deprived, or a little raspy. You are just a slave, heeding your body's call to go to bed. I'm grateful that I am now on the mend, but I'm worried that with so many of us conking out, even a small...
October 23, 2009
Podcast: The Cave Dwellers
In my latest podcast, I talk to Hazel Barton, a microbiologist who explores the bizarre biology of microbes that live in deep caves. Check it out.
October 21, 2009
The Loom and the Rest of Discover Go Mobile
[image error]Take the Loom with you. Discover has now set up a mobile version of the entire site, including this blog. It looks good on my Itouch, I have to say, but judge for yourself. And let us know if you find any bugs in need of fixing.
October 16, 2009
A Recipe For Fish [Science Tattoos]
Joshua, a conservation biologist, writes, " This was a tattoo I got of one of the species that I did my Ph.D. on. The fish is Halichoeres hortulanus and the DNA sequence is the primer for one of the genes I used to study the fish (the mitochondrial control region)."
October 15, 2009
Play Doh And Multicellular Life Together, At Last
Check out this movie that uses Play Doh to explain the evolution of single-celled microbes to multicellular animals. It's from Creature Cast, a very promising blog on biology from Casey Dunn of Brown University and his compadres.
CreatureCast Episode 2 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.
The Blind Locksmith Continued: An Update from Joe Thornton
I've written a few times here about the ongoing work of Joe Thornton, a biologist at the University of Oregon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Thornton studies how molecules evolve over hundreds of millions of years. He does so by figuring out what the molecules were like in the distant past and recreating those ancestral forms in his lab to see how they worked. I first wrote about his work looking at how one molecule in our cells evolved from one function to another (here, here, and ...
October 12, 2009
New Podcast: Microbes As Computers
[image error]My second podcast is now live. I talk to Dennis Bray of the University of Cambridge about cells as microscopic computers. I first came across Bray's work while working on my book, Microcosm. I was looking for new work on how E. coli manages to figure out where to go when it doesn't have a brain or even a single neuron. Before long, I came across Bray's remarkable work on the sophisticated information-processing that goes on inside the bug.
In this week's podcast I sound like I'm broadcasting o...
