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
October 26, 2006
Category: Upcoming Talks
Just an update to my post about talking this weekend at the National Association of Science Writers meeting: in addition to the panel I was originally scheduled to join--on book publicity--I've also been added to a panel talk on Friday...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:23 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 25, 2006
Category: Evolution
To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:01 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 23, 2006
Category: General
I'll be speaking on Saturday at the National Association of Science Writers annual meeting in Baltimore. I'll be discussing how writers can publicize science books in the age of the Internet. It's a subject I'm still figuring out for myself,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:11 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 20, 2006
Category: Evolution
Martin Schaefer, one of the scientists I wrote about in my recent post on autumn leaves, has joined the comment thread and kindly answered some questions about his work. Check it out....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:29 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 18, 2006
Category: Evolution
Flowers, flagella, feathers. Life is rife with complex features--structures and systems made up of many interacting parts. National Geographic magazine asked me to take a tour of complexity in life and report on the latest research on how it evolved....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:39 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
This fall we've had some rude visitors out by the front door. One morning a strangely foul smell wafted through the windows. When we looked outside for a dead animal, we found nothing. But we noticed some downright obscene growths...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:47 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 17, 2006
Category: Evolution
As the autumn leaves turn handsomely, I've been wondering, why do trees bother? It's a question scientists have been asking for the past few years, and for the first time, they've carried out an experiment to find out....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:34 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 13, 2006
Category: Life Elsewhere
Galileo discovered Saturn's rings, but called them ears. If only he could see what Cassini sees. Cue kettledrums......
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:28 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 12, 2006
Category: The Parasite Files
Toxoplasma, that mind-altering, cell-manipulating, all-around awesome parasite that sits in the brains of billions of us, is back in the news. Infection with the parasite raises the chances a woman will have a boy from 51% to 72%. The average...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:05 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 10, 2006
Category: General
The Seed in-house blog, Page 3.14 has been running Q & A's with some of its bloggers. Mine's up now....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:32 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 9, 2006
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
Two years ago this month, I was taken aback by some explosive news. A team of Indonesian and Australian scientists reported that they had discovered fossils of what they claimed was a new species of hominid. It lived on the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:21 AM • 40 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 2, 2006
Category: Evolution
This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:58 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
