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
"As fine a book as one will find on the subject."-- Scientific American
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
August 30, 2006
Category: Global Warming
From time to time, my Seed magazine hosts throw out a question for bloggers to answer. Today's question is concerns a column by James S. Robbins on global warming in the National Review Online. Robbins claims that global warming will...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:53 PM • 30 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
August 28, 2006
Category: Life Elsewhere
I'll admit, I was a bit surprised when Popular Mechanics got in touch with me a while back about writing a story about aliens. I had always associated the magazine with people who knew how to take their car apart...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:26 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 25, 2006
Category: Evolution
The language of DNA is written in a four-letter alphabet. The four different chemical units of DNA (called nucleotides) create an incomprehenisbly vast range of possibility codes. Consider a short sequence of 41 nucleotides. There are over 4.8 trillion trillion...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:58 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 24, 2006
Category: Evolution
Cut-and-paste creationism? Yesterday I pointed readers to a column attacking evolution by Jack Kemp on the web site Town Hall. Today a sharp-eyed commenter pointed out that it is almost entirely identical to a column from Phyllis Schlafly from August...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:39 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 23, 2006
Category: Evolution
Scoop up some dirt, and you'll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:01 PM • 12 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Our Dear Leaders Speak
From his latest column: Liberals see the political value to teaching evolution in school, as it makes teachers and children think they are no more special than animals. Childhood joy and ambition can turn into depression as children learn to...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:07 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 22, 2006
Category: Evolution
I'm happy to report that the eyes are back. My third book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, came out in 2001. It's a survey of the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:10 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2006
Category: Evolution
Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts--invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia's opportunities for long-term...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:48 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
The Sunday Times in the UK reported yesterday on an upcoming paper that claims that the ever-fascinating Homo floresiensis (a k a the Hobbit) is not a new species, as previously reported. Instead, it was a human with a genetic...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:45 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2006
Category: Evolution
I was happy to see that my post on Tuesday about the evolution of whales attracted a lot of readers. One commenter asked about seals and manatees. As other commenters kindly explained, those mammals descend from other ancestors (relatives of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:17 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 16, 2006
Category: Evolution
The textbook explanation of DNA goes something like this: enzymes in our cells read a stretch of DNA and convert its code into a single-stranded RNA molecule, which is then used by ribosomes as a template for building a protein....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:32 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 15, 2006
Category: Evolution
Whales are beautifully ridiculous. They are majestic divers, in some cases plunging nearly two miles underwater. And yet sooner or later they must rise back to the surface to breathe air. They breathe through a rather ridiculous-looking hole on top...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:01 PM • 25 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
August 9, 2006
Category: Evolution
Can a tumor become a new form of life? This is the freaky but serious question that arises from a new study in the journal Cell. Scientists from London and Chicago have studied a peculiar cancer that afflicts dogs, known...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:02 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 7, 2006
Category: Evolution
Last night, as my family settled into a three-hour drive home, I began scanning the AM radio dial. The tuner stopped at on a well-produced segment in which the announcer was talking about recent evolution of pigmentation genes and lactose-digestion...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:33 AM • 145 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
August 4, 2006
Category: The Parasite Files
I'm heading out of blog contact for a couple days, so allow me to share one of my favorite posts, from last January--on wasps that perform brain surgery....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:46 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 2, 2006
Category: Evolution
This morning the Kansas State Board of Education is all shook up. Last year the board voted 6-4 for much-criticised, creationism-friendly science education standards. Yesterday the primaries for the board elections took place, and on balance, the science-standards bloc lost...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:27 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 1, 2006
Category: The Parasite Files
Once again, I hear the siren song of Toxoplasma, the parasite that dwells in the brains of 50 million Americans. Toxoplasma gondii is an extraordinary creature, whose exploits I've chronicled in previous posts , an article in the New York...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:08 PM • 72 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains
John Noble Wilford has a long, interesting article in today's New York Times on the rehabilitation of the alchemist. Once the icon of the bad old days before the scientific revolution, alchemy has been emerging in recent years as more...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:09 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
