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The Loom

A blog about life, past and future

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Zimmer133.jpg 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

Books by Carl Zimmer

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NOW ON SALE!
Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life



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Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition



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"As fine a book as one will find on the subject."-- Scientific American

Revised with a new introduction





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"Superb...a non-stop delight."-- New Scientist





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"Fascinating...thrilling... Zimmer has produced a top-notch work of popular science." --LA Times





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"A fascinating story, which Zimmer unfolds as a tale of high-stakes scientific sleuthing...thanks to marvelous lucid writing." --Booklist





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Why the Loom?

"...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

November 30, 2007

Swinging Through The Tree of Life Tomorrow on NPR

Category: Evolution

A quick heads-up: I'll be talking about the tree of life tomorrow morning on NPR's Saturday Weekend Edition. The segment will be archived on their "Science Out of the Box" web page. We'll be talking about everything from animals to...

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November 29, 2007

Parasite Rex Makes A List

Category: Writing Elsewhere

The Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology has rolled out the "Stevens Seventy," the seventy greatest science books since 1900. If you click all the way through to Z, my 2000 book Parasite Rex ends the list....

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November 27, 2007

The New Yorker Gets Infected

Category: Evolution

I just noticed that in the new issue of the New Yorker Michael Specter has written an article on the viruses in our genome. I wrote about this research in the New York Times a year ago. I haven't had...

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Borat sapiens

Category: Evolution

For my latest "Dissection" column in Wired, I take a look at the tree of life, and the way it changed dramatically thirty years ago this month. To get a sense of what the tree looks like today, I pointed...

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November 20, 2007

A Monster To Remember After the Writers' Strike

Category: Evolution

Once the writers' strike is over, anyone in the mood to make a new monster movie might consider this beast, described today in the journal Biology Letters. It's Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a "sea scorpion" that lived 390 million years ago. Based...

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Science Tattoo Friday: Holiday Edition

Category: Science Tattoos

"This neuron tattoo was done a few months ago. When I was 18, my dad passed away from Lou Gehrig's, which is a disease of motor neurons that innervate muscles. His battle with neurodegeneration helped me decide on a...

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Florida--Where The Living Is Still Contradictory

Category: Evolution

The deja vu is hitting hard. Two years ago a Pennsylvania court was hearing a challenge to introducing intelligent design into a public school in the town of Dover. At the time, I argued that people should look south to...

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Weird Life: Pass the Arsenic, Please

Category: Evolution

A couple months ago, I wrote a feature for Discover about the intriguing possibility that life might have originated more than once on Earth--and that maybe those alternative life forms were still alive among us today. Paul Davies, one of...

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That Old Time Complexity

Category: Brains

My fellow bloggingheads John Horgan and George Johnson took some time on their latest science talk to dissect my New York Times article on swarms (you can jump to that section here). John wonders if I'm just discovering all the...

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Back on the Ground

Category: General

I'm back from California and the award ceremony I mentioned last week. The trip was fun but a little absurd--I flew across the country and back within 36 hours. It's time for some serious carbon offsetting. I got to hang...

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November 13, 2007

Rules of the Swarm

Category: Brains

Not much blogging this week--I'm heading out to California to receive the National Academies prize I wrote about a while back. In the meantime, let me direct your attention to my lead article in this week's Science Times section of...

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November 12, 2007

cdesign proponentsists in motion

Category: Evolution

I agree with Phil that it's a good term. In fact, when I have to talk about intelligent design, these slides are how I illustrate its evolutionary roots....

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November 9, 2007

Science Tattoo Friday: Someone Needs Your Ideas!

Category: Science Tattoos

1. From this week's crop of new tattoos: Abraham writes: "I got mine in grad school (PhD materials science and applied physics, 2004 Cal). The tatoo is a convergent beam electron diffraction (CBED) image of 6-4 Ti alloy (hexagonal,...

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Springtime Will Be Complicated

Category: Writing Elsewhere

This is a new and fascinating map. It shows how next spring is probably going to come early here in New England, as it has come earlier and earlier for the past few decades. But in Florida it will probably...

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November 8, 2007

Workshop Update: New Time, New Podcast

Category: General

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I'll be teaching a workshop in January at Yale about science writing. The response has been fantastic, with 90 people signed up at my last count. What makes the response particularly interesting is...

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November 6, 2007

Bony Beauties

Category: Evolution

I am a bone geek, I confess. On my bookshelves are a bunch of coffee-table books full of skulls, femurs, and xyphoid processes. They include From Lucy To Language, loaded with hominid remains, Human Bones for our current anatomy, and...

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November 3, 2007

Talking, Past and Future

Category: Upcoming Talks

I've updated the talks page on my web site after a long stretch of neglect. I've included links to podcasts and video of previous appearances, and what information I have at this point about upcoming talks. It's going to be...

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November 2, 2007

Spelling, Shpelling

Category: Meta

Sorry about the mistake on the last post's headline. (Vengeans? Sort of like vengeful vegans?) Spell-checkers have turned my brain to mush....

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Science Tattoo Friday: Back with a Neurochemical Vengeance

Category: Science Tattoos

"Here is a picture of my serotonin tattoo. I don't know that it needs much more explanation than it's my favorite neurotransmitter."--Hayley I thought there were more science tattoo out there. Last week brought nothing, but this week brought...

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