Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 91

Best Name For A Disease?

I'm at the American Society for Microbiology Annual Meeting, swimming in a lot of excellent new research. I also just learned about a disease I never heard of before, with a truly awesome name: Burning Mouth Syndrome.

When I posted this on Twitter, the writer Michael Paul Mason immediately responded with his own favorite: Smoking Stool Syndrome.

So what's your favorite?

Update: Maps For Flying Forever

Be sure to see the great interactive feature the Times put together for my piece on ultramarathon birds.

Discover Your Inner Godwit

On March 29, 1912, Robert Scott and two fellow explorers huddled in a tent during a fierce Antarctic blizzard. They had landed on the edge of Antarctica five months earlier, hoping to be the first people in history to reach the South Pole. They succeeded in reaching the Pole, but it was a bitter success. They discovered that another team, led by Roald Amundsen, had gotten there first. So Scott and his team turned back and began the 800-mile journey back to the sea. They hauled sledges...

Dogs, Bonobos, and You

The World Science Festival is running a blog in conjunction with this year's festivities. Today I've written a post about one of the sessions, where scientists will talk about how we can understand our own minds by studying animal minds. Check it out here or here.

The Cretaceous Comes To My Front Yard

Sunday morning was cool and foggy, and so we were not surprised to discover the garden full of craters and trenches. A snapping turtle the size of a manhole cover was busy laying her eggs.

This is an annual ritual in this part of New England. The first time I encountered a snapping turtle here, not long after we had moved into our house, I was terrified. Our children were toddlers, old enough to run but not old enough to know they should stay away from animals that can snap off your finger...

Hornet, Hardcore [Science Tattoo]

Nick writes, "A tattoo of Vespa crabro. I got it while I was working in the entomology department of Va Tech. I was the most hardcore nerd there."

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Hornet, Harcore [Science Tattoo]

Nick writes, "A tattoo of Vespa crabro. I got it while I was working in the entomology department of Va Tech. I was the most hardcore nerd there."

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Yammerings: San Diego, New York, and TV

I've got some public face time coming up:

Tuesday, May 25, 5:30 pm: In San Diego, I'll be talking at the American Society for Microbiology. I was asked to speak at the President's Forum, "Tell the Story of Science." My own talk is, "Newspapers, Blogs, And Other Vectors: Infecting Minds With Science In the Age of New Media."

Random House will be kindly providing copies of Microcosm for sale at the meeting. I will spend some time signing them all when I get to the conference Monday. The books...

James Joyce's Words Come To Life, And Are Promptly Desecrated

This old English major's heart is warmed by the news that the new synthetic cell carries a line from James Joyce, inscribed in its DNA: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."

What would Joyce have thought if someone had told him that one day that the synthesized genome of a goat pathogen would carry his words? I would hope that whoever told him would make sure that he did not think this moment marked his literary immortality. In fact, his deathless prose is...

Synthetic Genome+Natural Cell=New Life?

Craig Venter has taken yet another step towards his goal of creating synthetic life forms. He's synthesized the genome of a microbe and then implanted that piece of DNA into a DNA-free cell of another species. And that…that thing…can grow and divide. It's hard to say whether this is "life from scratch," because the boundary between such a thing and ordinary life (and non-life) is actually blurry. For example, you could say that this is still a nature hybrid, because its DNA is based on the...