A blog about life, past and future
Carl Zimmer is a science writer. His articles appear in the New York Times and many magazines. He is also the author of six books about science. Send messages to blog/ at/ carlzimmer/ dot/ com
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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
November 26, 2003
Category: Evolution
Futurepundit has an interesting post based on a new paper about so-called junk DNA. Only 2% or so of the human genome actually encodes protein sequences. The rest is a grab-bag of broken genes and virus-like sequences called mobile elements...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:53 PM • 1 Comments •
November 24, 2003
I'll be talking about evolution on Tuesday at 12 pm PST/3 pm EST with Alan Stahler on KVMR in California. You can listen to the live webcast here. UPDATE: I'll be on at about 20 minutes after the hour. Andy...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:54 PM • 0 Comments •
November 23, 2003
Category: Brains
It's too early yet for reviews of Soul Made Flesh to start rolling in (it pubs in January 2004), so I'm still in an anxious state. But this is promising: The Daily Telegraph in London asked several leading writers to...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:56 PM • 1 Comments •
November 21, 2003
Category: Evolution
The glow of a beetle has inspired an elegant bit of evolutionary detective work that appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans like myself are familiar with fireflies, but in the tropics the night is also...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:06 PM • 4 Comments •
November 19, 2003
Category: Evolution
Texas may be off the hook for now, but Razib at Gene Expression observes that some medical students at the University of Oslo are lobbying for anti-evolution lectures. I guess I'll try not to be in Norway if I need...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:07 PM • 0 Comments •
November 18, 2003
Category: Brains
For everyone interested in how their brain works, I'd suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:12 PM • 1 Comments •
November 13, 2003
Category: Brains
The case of Terri Schiavo has moved back into the Bleak House realm of endless trips to the courthouse. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Schiavo lost consciousness thirteen years ago, and her husband has been trying for the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:27 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Evolution
Over the past couple years, a few pounds of rock from Australia have been the subject of a fierce scientific battle between geologists and paleontologists. Some paleontologists have claimed that microscopic marks in the 3.5 billion year old rocks are...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:24 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: General
In February I wrote an article in Science about what Craig Venter's up to these days. In the late 1990s Venter made his mark by challenging the government human genome project to a race, promising to beat them to the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:19 PM • 0 Comments •
November 12, 2003
Category: Evolution
Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution? It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:29 PM • 0 Comments •
November 11, 2003
Category: General
A lot of work has gone into reconstructing an entire human being in a computer. Computer scientists put in the precise dimensions of a person's body, factor in biomechanics, mimic facial expressions and so on. This work gets huge amounts...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:31 PM • 2 Comments •
November 7, 2003
Category: Evolution
Chris Mooney, CalPundit, Signal+Noise and others have been doing a great job of keeping track of the woeful textbook battles down in Texas. The Board of Education there has been arguing over how evolution should be presented in the textbooks...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:37 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Evolution
The other day I (among others) came down on Gregg Easterbrook for his poor grasp of science. Finding myself procrastinating today, I wandered over to his blog and had yet another good laugh. In a post today, he actually displays...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:35 PM • 1 Comments •
November 4, 2003
Category: Evolution
My hotel here in Wisconsin has a great high-speed connection and I have some downtime, and so I'll post on a really interesting paper that just came out that may tell us a lot about how we got so complex....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:39 PM • 0 Comments •
November 2, 2003
I'll be off blogging duty for a couple days while I head out to Wisconsin to give a couple talks at UW. I'll be talking about what chimp DNA can tell us about ourselves. I wrote about the topic last...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:43 PM • 0 Comments •
