Carl Zimmer's Blog, page 97
April 1, 2010
Who Will Dare To Challenge The Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer?
This morning, during my daily graze of news and commentary, I've come across some fairly excellent science-themed April Fool's jokes. But it will take an exceptional hoax to mount a serious challenge to what is arguably the finest science-themed April Fool's joke of all time, which today celebrates its fifteenth anniversary: the tale of the hotheaded naked ice borer.
Then-Discover-senior-editor, now-contributing-editor, and forever-all-around-good-guy Tim Folger concocted an article detailing ...
Who Dare Challenge the Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer?
This morning, during my daily graze of news and commentary, I've come across some fairly excellent science-themed April Fool's jokes. But it will take an exceptional hoax to mount a serious challenge to what is arguably the finest science-themed April Fool's joke of all time, which today celebrates its fifteenth anniversary: the tale of the hotheaded naked ice borer.
Then-Discover-senior-editor, now-contributing-editor, and forever-all-around-good-guy Tim Folger concocted an article detailing ...
March 27, 2010
Yet Another Update to the X-Woman's Fingerbone
The Atavism put together a nice picture showing how the X-woman's DNA could just be plain old Neanderthal genes. I've shamelessly stolen it for my own post.
There Are More Painful Things [Science Tattoo]
Corey writes, "I got this tattoo as an homage to the pain of my graduate work. Its a model of fulvic acid which is a representation of natural organic matter in the soil. I work with this molecule for my grad work and I figured I might as well get it etched into my skin so I can look at it and say, 'Well, at least it hurt less than grad school at Cornell.'"
March 26, 2010
Luring Out The Missing Biosphere
Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don't know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you'll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read ...
Welcome Razib and Ed to the Hive
Today Discover gains two new bloggers: Razib Khan and Ed Yong. But while they're new to Discover, they're far from new to the science blogosphere. I'm a long time reader of both of their blogs, and urge everyone to check them out, too. Welcome!
March 25, 2010
Another Update to X-Woman's Fingerbone
I've added comments from biologist Laurent Excoffier to my X-woman post. His verdict: probably another species of hominid.
March 24, 2010
Welcome to Your Viral World
Line up all the viruses on Earth end to end (go ahead, I'll wait), and they'll stretch over 10 million light years. In my new podcast, I talk to Curtis Suttle of the University of British Columbia about what it means to live on a virus-dominated planet.
Bioscience: A Fab Review of the Tangled Bank
Another great review of the Tangled Bank, this time from Bioscience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences:
"In the best of all worlds, every educated American could and should read this book, and as a result, would have a much richer understanding of evolution as a force directly affecting our lives."
(NB–Even if you don't live in the U.S., you may want to check it out!)
