Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 93

Simply Impossible

Here's the newly anointed best visual illusion of 2010. No fancy computer graphics. Just cardboard, glue, and some wooden balls. Fabulous.

Evolution and the Media: Caveat Lector!

How should teachers use the media to teach students about evolution? Carefully! That's my advice in a paper I was asked to write for the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach, where I take a look at the history of journalists writing about evolution.

I start way back, at the beginning:

Evolution has been news from the start. On March 28, 1860, The New York Times ran a massive article on a newly published book called On the Origin of Species (Anonymous 1860). The article explained how the...

This Saturday: Science Writing at the Smithsonian

Attention, DC readers! I'll be one of the speakers this Saturday at a meeting entitled "Science Writing: From Eureka to Digital Publishing." I'll be giving the "digital tools and techniques" talk. Don't expect an html tutorial; I'll be talking instead about how to adapt the fundamental of good science writing to new formats.

Here's where you can register. To get the $35 member discount, use the promo code 182603.

From the meeting web site :

Co-sponsored with the Science-Medical Writingbr

The Posing Snake [Science Tattoo]

An anonymous reader writes, "I am a computer programmer and amateur herpetologist. On my leg is Henry, a North Brazilian Boa constrictor — rare in captivity at the time. I brought him in for photos before we began, and again after it was completely healed. As you can see in this photo, his colors were altered in the tattoo to stand out better. It took 20 hours over the course of 14 months to complete and was done completely freehand. Each scale was drawn individually. This photo is so...

Soul Made Flesh–A Late, Late Rave!

[image error]While perusing the latest issue of the  Journal of the History of Neurosciences, I was surprised to discover a review of my book Soul Made Flesh. It's been six years since it came out. I guess the stack by their nightstand is pretty tall!

But I certainly don't mind the wait when it's a review like this:

This book is a joy to read. Zimmer has crafted a pleasant style, leveraging his talents that were cultivated during his time as a newspaper journalist. The texture of the pages and the...

A Hundred Years Without A Malaria Vaccine

When I've traveled abroad, I've gotten my share of jabs for hepatitis and other diseases. But for malaria, the best I could hope for was to take malaria-blocking drugs like Lariam, which gave me weird dreams at night and made me feel as if someone was tugging my hair all day. For people who live in countries with malaria, these prophylactic drugs just aren't practical. Given that 800,000 people a year die of malaria, why don't we have a good vaccine for it? It's not for lack of trying–in...

Skull Caps and Genomes

The skull cap is thick and flat. It looks distinctively human, and yet its massive brow ridge, hanging over the eyes like a boney pair of googles, is impossible to ignore. In 1857, an anatomist named Hermann Schaafhausen stared at the skull cap in his laboratory at the University of Bonn and tried to make sense of it. Quarry workers had found it the year before in a cave in a valley called Neander. A schoolteacher had saved the skull cap, along with a few other bones, from destruction and...

A Quotation for the Morning

"Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?"

–Thomas Huxley, Man's Place in Nature (1863)

How To Make A Superweed

Around 1870, a tiny Chinese insect turned up in farm fields around the city of San Jose, California. The creature would inject a syringe-like mouthpart into a plant and suck up the juices. It grew a plate-like shield that covered its entire body, out from which new insects would eventually emerge. The San Jose scale, as the insect came to be known, spread quickly through the United States and Canada, leaving ravaged orchards in its path. "There is perhaps no insect capable of causing greater...

Linux Versus E. coli

In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvald got annoyed. He had bought a personal computer to use at home, but he couldn't find an operating system for it that was as robust as Unix, the system he used on the computers at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote one. He posted it online, free for anyone to download. But he required that anyone who figured out a way to make it better would have share the improvement with everyone else who used the system...