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
June 27, 2006
Category: Evolution
Last night I took the ferry across Long Island Sound to spend the day in Stony Brook at Evolution 2006, the joint annual meeting of American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:02 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2006
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
It's been twenty months now since scientists reported discovering fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores belonging to a three-foot-tall hominid with a brain the size of a chimp that lived recently as 12,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis, as this...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:24 PM • 18 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
June 20, 2006
Category: The Parasite Files
Next time I go to the doctor, I think I'll get him to give me a test for Toxoplasma. Fifty million Americans have the parasite, so I wouldn't be the first. And if I was carrying it around in my...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:19 AM • 9 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
June 17, 2006
Category: Evolution
Two hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts, an African lion killed someone. Along with a meal, the big cat got a wicked stomachache. Today a record of that unfortunate death still survives, in the bacteria that make big cats sick....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:16 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2006
Category: Evolution
A bunch of good reviews on natural selection in humans are coming out, reflecting the explosion of research on how evolution has shaped our genome. See here and here. Today in Science another good one is out. What sets this...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 14, 2006
Category: Evolution
The other day I was interviewed on KUCI-FM in Irvine, California, about the evolution of bacteria in yogurt. You can listen to the podcast here....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:52 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Scientists have figured out many ways to study the origin of species. They can build evoluitonary trees, to see how species descend from a common ancestor. They can survey islands or mountains or lakes to see how ecological conditions foster...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:00 PM • 5 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
June 9, 2006
Category: General
Greetings. As I bring in my html luggage and unpack, let me stop for a moment to introduce myself and this blog. I'm a science writer. I started out at Discover, where I ended up as a senior editor before...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:00 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
When we speak of the Hobbit, let us not forget her tools. Last year, scientists reported discovering fossils of a three-foot-tall hominid that they named Homo floresiensis, and which I can't keep myself from calling the Hobbit. Its bones turned...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:13 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
