Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 57

Best of American Science Writing 2011 (Now with extra bloggy goodness)

I'm thrilled to have a piece of mine in this year's edition of Best of American Science Writing. The book, edited by Rebecca Skloot and her father Floyd, is officially published on Tuesday, 9/27, but you can order it now on Amazon. My semi-skeptical take on the Singularity is in there, as is lots of excellent stuff–including fellow Discover blogger Ed Yong's tale of sushi genes in Japanese gut bugs. If I'm not mistaken, that's the first time a blog post has made it into this series. So congratulations to Ed Yong for giving the old blogs-versus-journalism critics another reason to pull their hair out.

Monday, Tuesday: New Haven, New York

On Monday, I'll be speaking at a master's tea at Morse College at Yale at 4 pm about outbreaks–real and fictionalized, viral and bacterial. It's free and open to the public.

On Tuesday, I'll be participating in Story Collider, a marvelous series of performances in which people tell stories about science. I am a bit nervous about this one for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I go on stage after Bora Zivkovic. I've sat in Bora's car, listening to his stories, which he tells with one hand on the wheel and the other sweeping around in operatic gestures. I know what I'm up against.

The fun starts at 8 pm in Brooklyn. Details are here.

The Penultimate Chapter in the XMRV-Chronic Fatigue Story?

I've devoted a few posts (here and here and here) to the saga of a disputed link between chronic fatigue syndrome and a virus called XMRV. This week marks the next chapter in the story, with more evidence that the original results were at least partly due to contamination and a partial retraction of the original paper. Two great writers at Science, Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen, have put together an epic telling of this affair, from the first reports two years ago to the latest developments. The magazine has wisely put the piece out in front of their paywall. Do read it.

As Enserink and Cohen note, this is not the final word. That will probably come early next year, when a larger study led by Ian Lipkin of Columbia. We'll see then if the link is buried at last, or lives to see another day.

Ebooks and science: Livestreamed tonight

I'm heading to New York this evening for an exciting conversation about the future of books, hosted by Science Online New York. We'll be talking about the new opportunities opened up by ebooks and apps, as well as some of the problems they will bring with them. There's now a waiting list to get into the room, but you can watch it livestreamed here, starting at around 7 pm EST. What makes the event particularly exciting for me is that you could pick any five members of the audience as the panelists, and the conversation would be just as interesting. So the prepared remarks are going to be short (just long enough to show off a few examples of new kinds of science books), and then we're going to plunge into a wide-ranging, room-wide exchange. We'll also be tracking questions with the #sonyc hashtag on Twitter, so feel free to join in the conversation.

Eye Versus Camera

Metaphors are essential to writing about science. Even scientists themselves use metaphors all the time, drawing from their familiar experiences to describe the unfamiliar. Building proteins is known as translation, for example, because the sequences of DNA and proteins are akin to words written in different languages. The cell has to translate one language into [...]

Washington Post rave for A Planet of Viruses

Here's a gratifying review of A Planet of Viruses, just out in the Washington Post: In A Planet of Viruses (Univ. of Chicago, $20), science writer Carl Zimmer accomplishes in a mere 100 pages what other authors struggle to do in 500: He reshapes our understanding of the hidden realities at the core of everyday [...]

Autumn yammerings: Where I'll be talking this fall

After a fairly quiet summer, I'm going to be giving some talks this fall, starting around my neighborhood and then radiating outwards. Here's a preliminary list of public events. I may be adding extra ones as the launch of Science Ink approaches. You can find the most up-to-date information on my talks page. September 15, [...]

The cell's changing room: My new profile of Lasker-award winner Arthur Horwich

In tomorrow's New York Times, I have a profile of Arthur Horwich, a medical geneticist who has spent a quarter century trying to figure out the workings of this beautiful molecular box. Today he won the Lasker Award, a prize for medicine that has often gone to scientists who later won the Nobel. Why all [...]

On Slate–Contagion: A dialogue about movies, viruses, and reasonable fear

Last year, while I was working on a profile for the New York Times of a virus hunter named Ian Lipkin, he told me he was consulting on a Hollywood movie about the outbreak of a new pathogen. Kate Winslet would be an epidemiologist. Lawrence Fishburne would work at the Centers for Disease Control. He [...]

The Verge of Human

If you were this man, you'd be smiling too. The man is Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He's holding the skull of Australopithecus sediba, a 1.98 million year old relative of humans, otherwise known as a hominin. In April 2010 Berger and his colleagues first unveiled the fossil [...]