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
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Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition
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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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
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 • 0 TrackBacks
November 13, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:16 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 12, 2007
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....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:13 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2007
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,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:15 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:07 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 8, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:55 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 6, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:52 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2007
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:17 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 2, 2007
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....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:47 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:01 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
