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
NOW ON SALE!
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
"Superb...a non-stop delight."-- New Scientist
"Fascinating...thrilling... Zimmer has produced a top-notch work of popular science." --LA Times
"A fascinating story, which Zimmer unfolds as a tale of high-stakes scientific sleuthing...thanks to marvelous lucid writing." --Booklist
Stay abreast of your favorite bloggers' latest and greatest via e-mail, via a daily digest.
"...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
April 30, 2007
Category: Evolution
When you find yourself, as I did a few days ago, spending a morning watching the absurdly long phalluses of ducks being coaxed from their nether regions, you can find yourself wondering how your life ended up this way....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:40 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 27, 2007
Category: Global Warming
Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas. You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:24 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 26, 2007
Category: General
Among the many obligations keeping me away from the blog is the nearly-completed overhaul of my web site, carlzimmer.com. Along with information on my books and talks, the site also has an archive of the past few years of my...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:34 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 17, 2007
Category: Meta
It's getting harder and harder to remember what it was like to write about science in the pre-Web 2.0 days. Back then (i.e., 2004), I'd come across an intriguing paper, I'd interview the authors, I'd get comments--supportive or nasty--from other...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:04 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 12, 2007
Category: Evolution
Trace your genealogy back 25 million years, and you'll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons--along with the monkeys of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:00 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 6, 2007
Category: Upcoming Talks
At the end of February I joined John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, to talk to students at the New York University journalism program about blogging about science. There's a post about the talk now up, including some...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:22 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Global Warming
Check this out. An international team of climate experts has been looking into the impact of climate on ecosystems, food production, and other aspects of the natural and human-controlled world. They've just come out with the executive summary of their...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:31 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General
I've just spent part of this evening pondering a commentary in the new issue of the journal Science by fellow Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet called "Framing Science." (The paper is behind a firewall--yeck--but Matt has expounded on similar...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:27 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 3, 2007
Category: The Parasite Files
Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom's favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:15 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 2, 2007
Category: Brains
You may have read not long ago about birds that can plan for the future. The occasion was a paper that came out in the journal Nature detailing some experiments on scrub jays. I found the paper fascinating, not just...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:37 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Global Warming
There's nothing more grating for a science writer than see your work get cut and pasted to give people precisely the wrong impression. My latest irritation: "Ten Questions For Al Gore and the Global Warming Crowd", which appeared Friday on...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:40 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
