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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
"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
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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 31, 2007
Category: Evolution
I've been a bit of a slave to trends recently. Everybody else has a Facebook page, so I guess I need one too--even if I don't quite know what to do with it. Myspace? Uh, okay... As with so...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:53 AM • 7 Comments •
August 28, 2007
Category: Evolution
Here is a lovely little creature from Sri Lanka, Pettalus cf. cimiciformis, a member of the same lineage that includes the daddy longlegs we're all familiar with. You could call it a daddy longlegs too, but its legs aren't particularly...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:18 AM • 15 Comments •
August 23, 2007
Category: General
As I've mentioned before, my brother Ben also blogs. An editor at Oxford American Dictionaries, he writes about words over at "From A to Zimmer." Not surprisingly, our blogs usually don't overlap. But Ben's latest entry--on very, very long words,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:58 AM • 50 Comments •
August 22, 2007
Category: Science Tattoos
Here's the latest addition to the Loom's science tattoo collection: from a food scientist, the molecule capsaicin, which makes chiles spicy. To see all the new tattoos, check out my Flickr set. And keep them coming--either in the comment thread...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:00 AM • 4 Comments •
August 21, 2007
Category: Global Warming
I've got a story in the current issue of Science about the challenge of predicting how many species (and which) may become extinct due to global warming. You can read the article here on my web site. I blogged about...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:00 AM • 4 Comments •
August 20, 2007
Category: Evolution
My wife and I were following our children across Appledore Island, reaching a crest where we could see the mainland coast--Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine all stretched out in a single sweep--when a woman in bloody surgical gear stepped out...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:00 AM • 4 Comments •
August 13, 2007
Category: The Parasite Files
Parasitoid wasps (or rather, one group of them called the Ichneumonidae) are the subject of one of Charles Darwin's most famous quotations: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:43 PM • 8 Comments •
August 12, 2007
Category: Evolution
I think that the next time I'm asked to talk about human evolution at 7:38 a.m. on a news show, I'm going to shave my head the night before. Nothing undermines the authority of a science writer like a serious...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:02 AM • 17 Comments •
August 10, 2007
Category: Science Tattoos
Jessica Pikul writes: I am a Chemistry PhD student at University of Washington. My research is in bioinorganic chemistry, specifically modeling non-heme iron-sulfur metalloenzymes. I am also a Celiac (autoimmune disorder triggered by ingesting gluten). The tattoo on my...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:15 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Science Tattoos
I'm finding that my post on science tattoos is getting troublesome now that I've added in so many images. Slow to load, easily bugged. Update: Ignore the stuff below about Picaca. I'm going to Flickr. The home for the set,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:11 AM • 5 Comments •
