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A blog about life, past and future
Carl Zimmer is a science writer. PLEASE VISIT THE LOOM AT ITS NEW HOME.
"Essential reading"--Publisher's Weekly
Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition
"As fine a book as one will find on the subject."-- Scientific American
Revised with a new introduction
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"...among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters, heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."
--Moby Dick
October 31, 2003
Category: Brains
Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:46 PM • •
October 30, 2003
Category: General
Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution. Web Webster says Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:49 PM • •
October 29, 2003
Category: Evolution
Evolution is nature's great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It's possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:54 PM • •
October 28, 2003
Category: Evolution
Loyal denizens of the blogosphere will forgive me if I begin this post by sketching out the details of the recent Gregg Easterbrook affair for those who haven't kept up with the details. Easterbook, a senior editor at the New...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:57 PM • •
October 26, 2003
Category: Evolution
When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:59 PM • •
October 23, 2003
Category: Brains
After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:03 PM • •
October 21, 2003
Category: Evolution
The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish--particulary with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:05 PM • •
October 17, 2003
Category: Brains
Science is so specialized these days that it's hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don't have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:11 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Brains
My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I've posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:09 PM • •
October 15, 2003
Category: Brains
In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn. Web Webster wrote: "So in a way, N. equitans is both 'smarter' in that it uses more of its total capabilities...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:19 PM • •
