Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 112

The Snake And The Ring [Science Tattoo]

Jeff, a pharmacy student in Richmond writes,

One thing about Richmond is that most everyone in the city has a tattoo. After living here for 3 years I finally gave into peer pressure and got a tattoo. The only thing I could think of getting that I wouldn't regret later in life was something nerdy/chemistry related, organic chemistry to be specific. While searching for inspiration I stumbled upon this story about the German chemist August Kekule who is responsible for discovering the ring...

Ardipithecus Is Ready For Her Close-Up

Tomorrow the Discovery Channel will show an Ardipithecus documentary. I've embedded a couple preview clips they've been sending around. I don't have cable myself (the same way an alcoholic doesn't keep cases of gin). So I'll leave it to commenters to offer reviews tomorrow.

There's obviously a striking parallel with the TV mania that recently surrounded another primate fossil, Darwinius. Personally, I don't see anything amiss (a priori, at least), with a documentary coming out right after a j...

I Am Shiva, Destroyer of Proteins

Deep down, we are all cannibals. In tomorrow's issue of the New York Times, I take a look at the science of autophagy: how our cells destroy themselves to live again. It turns out that this cellular cannibalism is crucial for our well-being in many ways. Scientists are now trying to improve our ability to destroy ourselves as a potential treatment for diseases like cancer and Huntington disease, and perhaps even to slow the process of aging itself. Check it out.

(Note to link-lovers: the...

Nobel For Telomeres

Congratulations to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this morning. They won for their discovery of telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep them from degrading and ward off aging. The Nobel site has posted some useful information about why this was such a profound discovery.

Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last

Meet Ardipithecus.

This introduction has been a long time coming. Some 4.4 million years ago, a hominid now known as Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what were then forests in Ethiopia. Fifteen years ago, Tim White of Berkeley and a team of Ethiopian and American scientists published the first account of Ardipithecus, which they had just discovered. But it was just a preliminary report, and White promised more details later, once he and his colleagues had carefully prepared and analyzed all the f...

Nature: The Tangled Bank "Excels"

I had a sudden drop in blood pressure when I checked out the new issue of Nature today. Evolutionary biologist Laurence Hurst wrote a two-book review: Richard Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, and my own The Tangled Bank. I revived when I saw that my book held up under Hurst's comparison: "The book is billed as the first textbook on evolution for the general reader, and in that framework, it excels."

Hurst used his review to pose an interesting question. He contrasts my style, which he...

The Digital Persona–Now On Video

The video of my conversation with Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal at New York University on digital personae is now online. Blogging, podcasting, etc., etc. etc. etc. And etc. Check it out. (Warning–sound's a little muddy. Ear phones will help.)

The Continuing Adventures of the Blind Locksmith: You Can't Get There From Here

Three years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about how scientists at the University of Oregon reconstructed the 450-million-year history of a protein. You can read the posts here, here, and here. What was particularly elegant about the study was how the scientists recreated the ancestral protein as it existed over 400 million years ago, to see how it functioned. Then they  pinpointed the mutations that transformed the protein, shifting it from an old function to a new one.

Recently, the...

CMP For Short [Science Tattoo]

Chrissy writes, "My science is microbiology, and my tattoo is serotonin with CMP, which happen to be my initials."

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

The Digital Persona

I'm going to be in New York on Thursday evening for a talk at NYU, in my capacity as visiting scholar.

All welcome!

From the NYU site:

Inside-Out: Carl Zimmer on Books, Blogs and Building a Digital Persona

Described by the New York Times Book Review as "as fine a science essayist as we have," the prolific and acclaimed author and journalist Carl Zimmer (currently a visiting scholar at the Institute) has embraced web platforms with a gusto matched by few reporters with his establishment...