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The Loom

A blog about life, past and future

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Zimmer133.jpg 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

Books by Carl Zimmer

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NOW ON SALE!
Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life



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Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition



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"As fine a book as one will find on the subject."-- Scientific American

Revised with a new introduction





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"Superb...a non-stop delight."-- New Scientist





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"Fascinating...thrilling... Zimmer has produced a top-notch work of popular science." --LA Times





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"A fascinating story, which Zimmer unfolds as a tale of high-stakes scientific sleuthing...thanks to marvelous lucid writing." --Booklist





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Why the Loom?

"...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

The Semiotics of a Leaf

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...

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October 28, 2005

More from Brown on Hobbits

Category: Blink ›

Peter Brown, anthropologist on the hobbit team, jumps into the comment fray himself on the nature of the fossils he discovered....

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Be heard!

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....

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October 27, 2005

Monkey Business

Category: Blink ›

A Bronx cheer for the four-legged hobbit from one of its discoverers. See my updated post....

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Hobbit As Monkey?

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...

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October 26, 2005

A Rough Grunt Dictionary

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...

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October 25, 2005

Where Is Your I?

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...

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The Loom: The Podcast Edition

Category: Blink ›

The science writer/blogging panel I was on over the weekend is now available on Contentious....

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October 24, 2005

Attention Nutmeggers Again

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...

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Now That's A Petition

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...

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Blog Notes

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,...

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October 17, 2005

My blog, your microphone

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...

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October 16, 2005

What's A Gene For?

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...

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October 15, 2005

Of zoos and polls

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...

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October 14, 2005

Whose Brain Is It Anyway? (The Further Hobbit Adventures)

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...

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October 11, 2005

Hobbits again

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...

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October 10, 2005

A 70-Million-Year March of the Penguins

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...

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Florida, Where The Living Is Contradictory

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...

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October 8, 2005

The Book Stack

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...

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October 5, 2005

Attention Nutmeggers

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...

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October 4, 2005

Evolution's Emily Litella?

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...

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October 3, 2005

Okay, It's Not A Nobel, But It's Still Nice

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...

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A Prize Bug

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)....

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