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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Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition
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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 30, 2005
Category: Evolution
A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year. In recent years, scientists have been roughly divided into two...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:50 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 28, 2005
Category: Blink ›
Peter Brown, anthropologist on the hobbit team, jumps into the comment fray himself on the nature of the fossils he discovered....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 6:17 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blink ›
I'll be talking to science writers about blogging on Tuesday in New York. If you'd like to participate in the discussion, leave your comments here. Thanks....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:23 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 27, 2005
Category: Blink ›
A Bronx cheer for the four-legged hobbit from one of its discoverers. See my updated post....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:09 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
Well, here's an idea I haven't heard of before... Last year scientists found the bones of what they recognized as a new species of hominid that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. They named it Homo floresiensis, and its...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:37 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 26, 2005
Category: Evolution
There have been some interesting new developments in the study of the evolution of language. The idea that human language emerged from hand gestures rather than sounds has been getting very popular in recent years. Some scientists think that certain...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:51 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 25, 2005
Category: Brains
Back in the 1600s, when neurology was born, it wasn't scientists who were looking at brains. The word scientist didn't exist. Instead, those visionary folks would have called themselves natural philosophers. As I researched this chapter of scientific history for...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:16 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blink ›
The science writer/blogging panel I was on over the weekend is now available on Contentious....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:52 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 24, 2005
Category: Evolution
Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk in Westport, Connecticut, based in part on my new book on human origins. I'll be talking about Hobbits, natural selection in our own time, and more (accompanied by visuals). The talk is part of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:25 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
You may have heard about a petition that was being signed by scientists earlier this month against the teaching of intelligent design. The inspiration came from another petition drafted by the Discovery Institute opposing evolution. It garnered 400 signatures of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:44 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General
I'm back from Pittsburgh, where the blogging-meet-science writing workshop went very well. Science writers are definitely curious, although you could hear some moans about the end of dead-tree publishing (a bit premature, in my opinion). Amy Gahran, my fellow panelist,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 17, 2005
Category: General
I'm going to be part of two workshops in the space of a couple weeks that will deal with the intersection of blogging and science writing. The first will be this Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:23 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 16, 2005
Category: Evolution
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:46 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 15, 2005
Category: Evolution
My post on the cognitive dissonance in Florida about evolution brought a lot of comments, including one from David. Although he seems to be attacking other commenters rather than post itself as far as I can tell, he makes three...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:29 PM • 71 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 14, 2005
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
Finally, more brains. On Tuesday I wrote about how the second batch of Homo floresiensis bones had at last seen the scientific light of day. Today the critics who don't think the Hobbit is a new species are making...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:14 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 11, 2005
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
Finally: more bones. Last October the world marveled at the announcement of the discovery of a new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, in a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. One conclusion was more shocking than...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:08 AM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 10, 2005
Category: Evolution
I've got a piece in tomorrow's New York Times on new research into the evolution of penguins. There's new work going on with penguin DNA and penguin fossils, such as this lovely 60-million-year old critter from New Zealand. It stood...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:28 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
When it comes to evolution, the nation's attention is focused these days on Dover, Pennsylvania, where parents are suing the local board of education for introducing creationism into the classroom. It's certainly an important case, but if you really want...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:16 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 8, 2005
Category: General
I've got a stack of new books that I want to get to this fall, although it's not going to be easy. If your interests run in the same currents, you may be interested in some of them... Us and...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:41 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 5, 2005
Category: Brains
If you live in the New Haven area, I hope you'll consider joining me tomorrow at 5 pm for a talk at the Yale Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh. The talk will be at 5 pm, Thursday...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:10 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 4, 2005
Category: Evolution
In July Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna wrote an eyebrow-raising op-ed in the New York Times that favored Intelligent Design over evolution. Now, as far as I can tell from this Reuters story, he's claiming he was misunderstood. "Maybe one...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:45 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 3, 2005
Category: General
Thanks to Scientific American for awarding one of its Science & Technology Web Awards to the Loom as one of their 25 favorite sites on the web, for "enchanting readers with every post." Congrats also to three other sites that...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:40 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: The Parasite Files
This year's Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here)....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:28 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
