Now on ScienceBlogs: Here we go again. Ecstasy, death...unsubstantiated claims.
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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"Fascinating...thrilling... Zimmer has produced a top-notch work of popular science." --LA Times
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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
April 30, 2005
Category: General
Thanks to the various readers who have noticed the creationist Google ads that pop up on some of the Loom's pages. Such are the hazards of letting robots handle ads. I will talk with the good people at Corante about...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:22 AM • 9 Comments •
April 29, 2005
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
The feud over Homo floresiensis, the little people of Indonesia, centers on whether they were an extinct diminutive species that evolved from some ancient hominid, such as Homo erectus, or whether they were just pygmy humans, perhaps suffering from...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:20 PM • 8 Comments •
April 28, 2005
Category: Evolution
From time to time, scientists discover that a species that was once thought to have become extinct is actually surviving in some remote place. If the species is a salamander or a lemur, it gets a quick headline and then...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:07 PM • 18 Comments •
April 25, 2005
Category: General
In the new issue of Smithsonian, I've got an article about life on Mars. I'm not writing about anything NASA has actually found, but instead about the difficulty of just recognizing life, even if the evidence is in your hand...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:40 AM • 4 Comments •
April 13, 2005
Category: Evolution
This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history. I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:54 PM • 7 Comments •
April 12, 2005
Category: Evolution
I have a weakness common to many bloggers--I like to check my site meter to see who's coming to my blog, and from where. Often I wind up discovering intriguing sites run by people whose interests run along the same...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:46 PM • 27 Comments •
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
I've been catching up on my online reading, and a couple days ago John Hawks offered this tantalizing hint that Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit may be a pathological specimen. Such claims have been made before based on...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:54 AM • 2 Comments •
April 11, 2005
Category: Brains
I've got an article in tomorrow's New York Times about a startling new way to control the nervous system of animals. Scientists at Yale have genetically engineered flies with neurons that grow light-sensitive triggers. Shine a UV laser at the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:40 PM • 3 Comments •
April 6, 2005
Category: Evolution
Two of the most important stages in hominid evolution were the origin of the entire hominid branch some six to seven million years ago and the first movement of hominids out of their African birthplace. This week we now get...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:09 PM • 1 Comments •
April 4, 2005
Category: Evolution
I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before this guy gets a show on cable. Bryan Fry is a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and he spends a lot of his time doing this sort of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:00 PM • 6 Comments •
