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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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
November 29, 2005
Category: Evolution
Writing about paleontology without illustrations is like directing a movie without a camera. When I wrote my first book, At the Water's Edge, I had the good fortune to join forces with Carl Buell, who brought walking whales and fish...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:24 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 28, 2005
Category: Blink ›
I've got a short piece in tomorrow's New York Times about the 400-million year history of insects. Some beautiful pictures of the creepers included....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:05 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General
Getting back home from a Thanksgiving journey full of turkey and queasy toddlers on airplanes, I just noticed that my visit-counter has rolled past the 500,000 mark. I never would have dreamed of such figures when I started this blog,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:34 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Natural selection is not natural perfection. Time and again, biologists have discovered traits that are both beneficial and harmful. Perhaps the most famous example is the devastating disorder known as sickle-cell anemia. To get sickle-cell anemia, you have to inherit...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:08 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 21, 2005
Category: Evolution
Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry, who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:51 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 18, 2005
Following up on my earlier post, I wanted to relay one more piece of book news. I've been getting some emails over the past couple months inquiring about my book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. I wrote it as...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:17 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2005
Category: Evolution
My latest book, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins is now available on Amazon.com, and I think it's getting put on the shelves at bookstores. I've only referred to the book here glancingly from time to time, and I wanted...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:00 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 14, 2005
Category: Evolution
This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog. Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:08 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 7, 2005
Category: Evolution
As a father of two dawn-loving children I don't get as much sleep as I used to, which makes me wonder sometimes why I crave it so much. A number of scientists who share my curiosity have turned to sleeping...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:19 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2005
Category: Evolution
The insects scandalously embracing in this picture are decorated crickets (Grylllodes sigillatus), which can be found in the southwestern United States, among other places. The droplet on the male's tail is--for want of a better word--a gift. After producing this...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:36 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2005
Category: Evolution
Back in March I described a provocative paper that suggested that plants might be able to get around Mendel's laws of heredity. Reed Cartwright, the grad student behind De Rerum Natura, left a comment expressing some deep skepticism. Now he...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:42 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
