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A blog about life, past and future
Carl Zimmer is a science writer. PLEASE VISIT THE LOOM AT ITS NEW HOME.
"Essential reading"--Publisher's Weekly
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
July 30, 2007
Category: Evolution
Last update of the day: Tomorrow's New York Times has a profile I wrote about Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist at Harvard. Nowak uses games to understand how cooperation evolved--whether that cooperation is between people or between cells or between...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:55 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Brains
The article I wrote for Scientific American in 2005 on the self has been anthologized in a new book: The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrows' Brain. Check out the book's line-up, which Oliver Sacks...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:00 PM • •
Category: Life Elsewhere
Today is a day for short updates, rather than deep essays. Update number 1: if you're interested in going to Mars, check out this podcast from Popular Mechanics in which I discuss the challenges astronauts would face living and working...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:38 AM • 2 Comments •
July 23, 2007
Category: Evolution
Last week the world press took note of a fish hauled up off the coast of Zanzibar. (AP, Reuters). Why did they care? Because the animal was one of the most celebrated fish of the sea: it was a coelacanth....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:01 PM • 19 Comments •
July 9, 2007
Category: Brains
Larry Moran passes on the rules of the game: go to the Wellcome Library's new image bank and find your favorite scientific image. Here's my pick: the first good picture of the brain, drawn by Christopher Wren in 1664 for...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:10 PM • 4 Comments •
July 6, 2007
Category: Life Elsewhere
Over the past few years, more and more scientists have been talking about the possibility that life exists, or can theoretically exist, in exotic forms that lack DNA, or perhaps even carbon or water. I've been keeping up with the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:17 PM • 11 Comments •
PZ Myers 11.19.2009
James Hrynyshyn 11.20.2009
Tim Lambert 11.18.2009
PZ Myers 11.14.2009
Tim Lambert 11.12.2009
