Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 55
November 7, 2011
The Toughest Bear in the Universe #scienceink
Spencer Debenport, a plant pathologist at Ohio State University, sports a tattoo of a tardigrade, a microscopic animal known as the water bear. "I have always loved microscopic critters, and there is none other as intriguing as the tardigrade," he writes. "The fact that they are so hardy, yet still that odd mixture of ugly/cute [...]
November 4, 2011
Radio: Friday 10 am PST (1 pm EST) on KQED
I'm in San Francisco for the Bay Area Science Festival. On Friday at 10 am PST, I'll be appearing on Forum, a morning show on KQED. Listen here live!
November 2, 2011
There's just something about him…
If you're a regular reader of the Loom, you're no doubt familiar with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. If you're not, now is the perfect time to meet this sinister creature which may very well be residing in your brain. It seems like every year or two, it gets more remarkable, and today it's taken another [...]
November 1, 2011
Calling the #scienceink tribe in San Francisco and Los Angeles! I'm headed your way this week.
Today Science Ink is published! Amazon has already run out of copies to sell, but not to worry–the books are spitting out of printers as I blog this. Order your copy, and it will get to you soon. If you're on the fence, check out this review from Nature (yes, that Nature, the venerable scientific [...]
October 31, 2011
Radiolab and Skeptically Speaking: For Your Listening Pleasure
If you've got some free time, here are a couple talks for your listening pleasure. Radiolab presents a story I told about a fateful trip to Sudan on their latest podcast. I've embedded it here: // Last week, I also talked about viruses on Skeptically Speaking, and they've posted our conversation here. (If you have [...]
October 25, 2011
Swans and stem cells: winners of this year's Imagine Science Film Festival
For the third year in a row I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Imagine Science Film Festival. Along with fellow judged neuroscientists David Eagelman and Darcy Kelley and documentary filmmaker Robb Moss, I watched a slew of short films that touched in one way or another on science. The awards [...]
October 24, 2011
Dinosaurs in flight: the movie
Earlier this year in National Geographic, I wrote about how feathers evolved long before flight. This timing naturally raises the question, how did feathered dinosaurs take to the air? My article was accompanied by a picture from the University of Montana lab of Ken Dial, who argues that before dinosaurs flew, they flapped their wings [...]
October 21, 2011
#scienceink on Studio 360 this weekend
We're getting close to the publication of Science Ink (official date, November 1), and some very fun things are approaching. The wonderful National Public Radio show Studio 360, hosted by Kurt Anderson, decided to talk to some of the scientists featured in the book–about their science, about their tattoos, and about the nature of openness. [...]
October 17, 2011
The "Language Gene" Turns Ten
Ten years ago this month, a team of University of Oxford scientists published a description of a family who struggled with words. By comparing their DNA, the scientists zeroed in for the first time on a gene associated with language, dubbed FOXP2. In my newest column in Discover, I look back at what scientists have [...]
October 14, 2011
An Infective Arm #scienceink
Nuria Gonzalez-Montalban, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, writes: My name is Núria and I am a biologist working with prions. Since the structure of prions has not been described yet (at least completely), I would not want to tattoo a possibly-wrong prion. Instead, I chose a T4 virus since part of my [...]
