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
"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
"A fascinating story, which Zimmer unfolds as a tale of high-stakes scientific sleuthing...thanks to marvelous lucid writing." --Booklist
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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
April 30, 2008
Category: Evolution
In my last post I wrote about how scientists are learning about the origin of animals by studying their genomes. One of the surprising findings of the latest research is that a group of animals called comb jellies (ctenophores) belong...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:36 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 28, 2008
Category: Evolution
Today in the Boston Globe, I write about how scientists are revising their understanding of the evolution of animals, thanks to more DNA and more weird animals. My favorite quote comes from biologist Mark Pallen, who says that the human...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:56 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 24, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
I recorded a video for my Facebook page about the Microcosm book tour, which I've cloned below. Still fine-tuning my video interfaces...how does YouTube embed, compared to blip.tv?...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:09 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 21, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
With two weeks to go till Microcosm's publication date, I'm happy to direct your attention to an adapted excerpt that's running in tomorrow's New York Times. In this passage, I discuss what I like to call E. coli's fingerprints....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:32 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2008
Category: Evolution
Click here to watch it on blip.tv (you can even watch in full screen, if you dare...)...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:44 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
NOTE: I'VE SET UP A FLASH VERSION OF THIS TALK HERE. DON'T BOTHER TRYING TO DOWNLOAD THE QUICKTIME VERSION I DESCRIBED IN THIS POST. Recently I gave the Discovery Lecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, in which I talked...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:29 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Microcosm: The Book
In my new Dissection column over at Wired, I take a look at a remarkable new experiment on E. coli. Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe's activity and found that it generally just...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:09 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2008
Category: Microcosm: The Book
Three weeks away from the publication of Microcosm, and another kind review has come out, this time from Library Journal: To display a broad swath of the people, scientific processes, and discoveries involved in biology, science writer Zimmer (Soul Made...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:30 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 14, 2008
Category: Upcoming Talks
I'm heading to Colorado to give a talk at the University of Denver tomorrow. The subject of the talk is my book Soul Made Flesh, about the birth of neurology in the 1600s (see PZ Myer's kind review here). I'll...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:38 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 13, 2008
Category: Evolution
Radiolab is a show about science that briliantly uses radio's greatest strength--sound--to bring stories to life in ways we print goons can only dream about. I wrote a story about how animals sleep. The Radiolab folks played the sound of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:12 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 12, 2008
Category: Brains
Today on bloggingheads, I talk to Gary Marcus, NYU psychologist and author of the new book Kluge, about all the telling ways in which our minds let us down, and what those shortcomings tell us about how it evolved....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:59 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 10, 2008
Category: General
Yesterday is the birthday of the man who froze the gallop and thawed it out again. From, of course, Wikipedia....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 4, 2008
Category: Brains
A new map of some of the connections neurons make in the frontal cortex of a monkey's brain. From PLOS Computational Biology. Bigger image here....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:01 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains
My newest "Dissection" column is up at Wired.com. This time around, I take a look at how our brains relay signals. They turn out to do a terrible job. What's impressive is how they clean up their own mess. Check...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:03 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 3, 2008
Category: General
In yet another sign of the growing respectability of the online world for communicating science, this year the National Academies have set up a new "online/Internet" category for their annual communication prize. Here's what they want: Entries original to the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:21 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 1, 2008
Category: Evolution
These biologists are holding out on me. I've been writing about biology for quite some time now, and sometimes I think I've got a pretty good sense of the scope of life. Neurosurgeon wasps--got it. Eels with alien jaws--check. And...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:29 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
