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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
November 30, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:10 PM • 1 Comments •
November 29, 2007
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....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:55 AM • 22 Comments •
November 27, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:45 PM • 9 Comments •
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:28 PM • 2 Comments •
November 20, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:00 PM • 14 Comments •
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:36 PM • •
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:06 PM • 5 Comments •
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:53 AM • 2 Comments •
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:20 AM • 2 Comments •
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:38 AM • 1 Comments •
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
