Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 116

What Do These Names Have In Common? [Science Tattoo]

After I saw this tattoo over on a sibling blog, Science Not Fiction, I knew it had to join the emporium. Its owner, Mark Yturralde, sent me this description of its origin:

After the Columbia accident, I felt compelled to do something. Space has always meant so much to me, and I felt I wanted to memorialize them somehow.

I donated to college funds and other charities in their name, but still felt like I needed to do more, and I found myself reliving and considering Challenger, and Apollo one too,

For Your Reading Pleasure: Global Warming Evolution and the Origin of Eukaryotes

Two of my stories came out this week–one on the near future, and one on the distant past.

1. Global warming is beginning to drive evolution of plants and animals. And soon it will be shifting to high gear. Read more at Yale Environment 360.

2. You, me, and the mushroom over there are all eukaryotes. So are slime molds and Giardia. We all share a number of features that set us apart from prokaryotes like E. coli. The split between eukaryotes and other living things is arguably the deepest in all li

Attention, Bulldogs

I've been quiet on the blog front for the past week thanks to some cross-country traveling for work and a few deadlines I must wrap up before turning to a new kind of experience–the pedagogical sort.

Next week I'll be teaching a science writing class at Shoals Marine Lab on the lovely Appledore Island (see here and here for my past trips to this exceptional place). I'm not sure the students realize how good they'll have it. They'll be learning to write about science by going on four field trips i

Fall talks and other new stuff on carlzimmer.com

A while back my web site was hacked and my archive of stories vanished. After switching servers, I left the site frozen in time while I dealt with more pressing matters. I've finally gotten a little stretch of free time to refresh my memory of Dreamweaver, and now the site is back up to date. Along with the archive, you can also find an updated list of past and future talks. I'm starting to make plans for talks about The Tangled Bank and the 15oth anniversary of The Origin of Species this fall,

Bacteria on the Beach: Microcosm on Nature's Summer Reading List

Nature offers suggestions for summer reading in the latest issue, and  Microcosm is on the list. Don't worry–just because the book is about E. coli doesn't mean they'll have to close the beach:

What is life? Why do creatures cooperate? Why do living things die? Carl Zimmer, a leading writer on evolution, finds answers to these and other big questions in the most humble of places — the common gut microbe, Escherichia coli. In Zimmer's hands, E. coli becomes a window on to the basic properties of l

Two Cultures Meeting Videos Posted

The New York Academy of Science has set up a nice site documenting their Two Cultures meeting in May. On their video page, you can see the panel on the media where I spoke. Despite appearances, I am not the younger brother of Andy Revkin and Ira Flatow. And be sure to check the two videos from Dean Kamen, describing his robot competition for kids.

Respect For the Fungus Overlords

When I first learned about the fungus Cordyceps, I refused to believe.

I was working on a book about the glories of parasites, so I was already in the parasitic tank, you could say. But when I read about how Cordyceps infects its insect hosts, I thought, this simply cannot be. The spores penetrate an insect's exoskeleton and then work their way into its body, where fungus then starts to grow. Meanwhile, the insect wanders up a plant and clamps down, whereupon Cordyceps grows a long stalk that spr

The Ocean's Skin of Jelly

My latest story for the New York Times has just gone online. It continues my string of stories in which I look at the familiar and find it deeply strange. The previous one was about fireflies. Tomorrow's story is about the surface of the ocean. It turns out to be a deeply weird thing–a gelatinous biofilm inhabited by a peculiar menagerie of microbes that play a vital role in our own well-being.

Check it out.

Good, Bad, and Government Funding

The National Institutes of Health funds research on the biology of morality in the human brain, as well as the evolution of  human morality by comparing humans to other primates. Francis Collins, who has been nominated to head NIH, has repeatedly criticized this sort of research–and has used its failure as evidence for the existence of God. In 2008, for example, he said, "I think human altruism can be seen as one of strongest signposts to the existence of a personal God. I can see no fully satis

The Imaginary Vortex [Science Tattoo]

Margot, a zoo veterinary technician writes, "In reading Carl Seife's fabulous book Zero, he presents a graph of complex numbers which plot a changing exponent for the basic formula (X+iY)n in which X represents real numbers and Y represents imaginary numbers. If Y=1, the result is a circle. Y1 creates a spiral outside the circle. The logarithmic spiral is a very natural and fractal form, and being in the biology field and a fractal freak, I was captiva