"...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
The Encyclopedia of Life, about which I blogged and wrote about in the New York Times, has gone live earlier than previously scheduled. So go check it out. A few people have left comments here, and others are blogging too....
My latest story for the New York Times is up: it's a sneak peek at the Encyclopedia of Life--a web site that will ultimately contain detailed pages about all 1.8 million known species. Right now it's just a demo site,...
The history of science is rife with fateful meetings. The astronomer Tycho Brahe hires a young assistant named Johannes Kepler, who will go on to discover in Brahe's observations the law of planetary motion. A bright but aimless British physicist...
It's fun to write about discoveries, but mysteries are important too. In my latest column for Wired.com, I explore the mysterious death of honeybees, and the trouble scientists are having pinning down a culprit. Honey Bees Give Clues on Virus...
In the comment thread for my post about Microcosm's rave review in Publisher's Weekly, outeast writes, There's been something I've been dying for, and here's as good a place as any to mention it: real coffee-table editions of your books,...
Let's hope the phylogeny of life doesn't get revised drastically anytime soon, for the sake of this woman...More details--and lots of new tattoos over at my Science Tattoo Emporium. (Plus a cool new category cloud for browsing!)...
For years, fellow scienceblogger PZ Myers has taught us all well why we ought to adore squid, octopuses, and other cephalopods. But I came to a new degree of appreciation when I traveled up to Woods Hole to spend some...
After six months of science tattoo madness, the ink keeps flowing. To keep up with the rising tide, please visit their new home: The Science Tattoo Emporium. (You can also get there via http://sciencetattoo.com ) I have an amazing...
After a lot of writing and a lot of waiting, the first review of my next book, Microcosm, has just come out. Actually, it's coming out on Monday in Publisher's Weekly, but they apparently couldn't wait, sending out a link...
I guess it's only appropriate that the week of Darwin's birthday is seeing a bunch of new reports about evolutionary transitions. On Monday there was news about how ancient whales with teeth turned into whales with baleen--thanks to the...