Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 129

Reminder: Lecture Tomorrow at UC Santa Barbara

I’m about to fly to California for my talk tomorrow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind in Santa Barbara, “Soul Made Flesh: Neuroscience in 1659 and 2009.” Here are the details.

Hope to meet some Santa Barbarans. (Or is that Santa Barbarians? Suddenly I have visions old Saint Nick with a pole-axe.)

[Image: Frontispiece to a Dutch edition of Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves (1665) by Thomas Willis. For more on Willis, see my book of the same name as my lecture]

Woolly Bear, Heal Thyself

Animals, as I explained in my recent column for Discover, take precautions not to get sick (including the famous anal cannon). We take precautions too–conscious ones, based on what we have learned about how diseases spread, and perhaps also unconscious ones that lower our risk of infection.

But if those precautions fail, we humans sometimes take medicines to kill off the pathogens making us sick. And there’s an intriguing body of evidence suggesting that animals take medicine too.

A lot of that ev

Ice Never Sleeps: George Will, Jr.

I’ve been writing from time to time recently about the poor job that op-ed sections do with science. As my prime example, I’ve focused on a column George Will wrote poo-poohing global warming for the Washington Post. But I’ve never meant to imply that that particular column was some isolated fluke. I think similar problems can be found in the editorial pages of many newspapers, and many branches of science are affected.

I don’t have the luxury (not to mention the masochism) to become a fact-check

The 2009 John Wesley Powell Memorial Lecture: “What Is Life?”

I’m honored to report that I’ve been asked to deliver this year’s John Wesley Powell Memorial Lecture.

Here is a description of the lecture series from its organizers, the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

The John Wesley Powell Memorial Lectures were inaugurated in 1929 in honor of the distinguished geologist and leader of the first expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Each

Sickly Flowers, Error Thresholds, And The Dawn of Life

[image error]This chrysanthemum leaf is infected with naked bits of genetic material known as viroids. Over at Origins, Science’s blog, I take a look at new research that suggests these extraordinary little pests may have a lot in common with the earliest life on Earth. Check it out.

Image: APSNet

Checking George Will: The Perils of Time Travel

While I was blogging over the past few weeks about fact-checking George Will’s dismissal of global warming (collected here), I got comments. A lot of them.

A fair number of commenters claimed George Will was right, and presented evidence that they claimed supported him. Some tried to back their claims with news that came out after Will’s column was published. For example, a few days after his column came out, there were reports that the a satellite that measure ice cover had some trouble and was

Talking About the Brain: Thursday March 12 in Santa Barbara

[image error] If you live in or around Santa Barbara, California, I’d like to invite you to a talk I’ll be giving at the Sage Center for the Study of Mind. It’s called, “Soul Made Flesh: Neuroscience in 1659 and 2009.” I’ll be talking about how the whole science of the brain was launched by alchemists, mystics, and other rogue natural philosophers during the English Civil War, and draw a few lessons for understanding the brain and mind in an age of fMRI scans, brain-machine interfaces, and o

Like A Frightened Turtle?

Several commenters checked out the 3-D video of the world’s oldest fossil brain I posted yesterday and were struck by just how tiny the 300-million-year-old fish’s brain was in comparison to its braincase. Their verdict: shrinkage. In the paleontological sense of the word, not the Seinfeldian one. After death, brains that do not simply disappear sometimes get smaller. In this particular fish, Sibyrhynchus denisoni the brain must have gotten a lot smaller. Check out this image, in which the brain

The 300-Million-Year-Old Brain: Now In 3-D

Paleontologists don’t go looking for brains, and I’m not surprised. I once got to hold a fresh brain in my hands (it was at a medical school–nothing fishy, I promise), and I can vouch that they are marvelously delicate: a custard for thinking. When any vertebrate with a brain dies, be it human, turtle, or guppy, that fragile greasy clump of neurons is one of the first organs to vanish. Scientists must infer what ancient brains were like very often by examining the case that held it–that is, if t