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Posts by this author
March 24, 2008
My recent piece on Slate about E. coli, evolution, and germ warfare is now on their podcast. You can listen to it with this embedded player below, or grab the mp3 file.
It is very weird to hear someone else read my words. I feel like a teacher is using me as an example of how not to do last night's…
March 21, 2008
My latest Dissection column for Wired.com takes on the old tug-of-war between Nature and Artifice. As I write in my new book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, scientists began to manufacture strange versions of the microbe in the early 1970s. In 1974, for example, scientists…
March 20, 2008
Having just written a book all about E. coli, including its evolution, I came to wonder what Darwin thought about microbes. I've searched far and wide. I've looked in biographies, for example, and the awesome site Darwin Online. I have found only one reference--to viruses:
A particle of small-pox…
March 19, 2008
Well, we're down now to seven weeks till Microcosm hits the book stores. Here and elsewhere I'm going to discuss some of the fascinating things I discovered about E. coli--and life in general--while working on the book. For instance, I came to have a grudging respect for the vicious strain of E.…
March 17, 2008
A few weeks ago I moderated a discussion about synthetic biology down in Washington. Excerpts from the talk (including the one above) are now posted here.
March 14, 2008
Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles is in Barcelona at the Evolution of Language conference, and he's live-blogging like crazy. Fascinating stuff well worth checking out. [Link fixed-cz]
March 13, 2008
If you're a scientist mysteried by the media, AAAS has set up a nice site to help. Included are a series of interviews with members of that dubious profession, including Science Friday's Ira Flatow talking about radio, and the New York Times's environment writer Andrew Revkin on newspaper reporting…
March 10, 2008
I'm heading to Sarasota, Florida, to talk tonight about the evolution of whales. If anybody bearing oranges gives me a hard time, I'll let you know.
The talk will be part of Mote Marine Laboratory's public lecture series. Here are the details. If you're in the neighborhood, come on by.
March 6, 2008
How old is the Grand Canyon? One answer is easy: a lot older than a few thousand years. A more precise answer is harder to get at, however. You have to climb into the caves of the Grand Canyon and read the geological clocks hidden there. For more, read my latest "Dissection" commentary at Wired.…
March 3, 2008
My talk last week at Carleton University in Ottawa went well--here's an interview with the university's magazine, and here's a report from someone in the audience.
More talks are coming up--
Next week: The evolution of whales at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.
Next month: Soul Made…
March 3, 2008
Hyenas are fascinating in many ways, such as the way female spotted hyenas are equipped with a penis of sorts (pdf). In tomorrow's New York Times, I look at a new kind of fascination: hyena brains. Hyenas have a remarkably complex social life, and it appears to have altered the shape and size of…
March 1, 2008
When one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience is helping you plumb the mysteries of consciousness, the self, free will, and the two minds that coexist in our skulls, it helps every now and then to touch your nose. To understand why touching your nose is such a profound experience, check out my…
February 26, 2008
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. I'm very curious to see what hard-core bioinformatics folks think as they…
February 25, 2008
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, but on Thursday, there will be thousands of pages up, each with details on a…
February 24, 2008
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 named Francis Crick is introduced to a boisterous…
February 23, 2008
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 Spread
February 22, 2008
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, meaning lavishly illustrated throughout rather than with a…
February 22, 2008
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!)
February 18, 2008
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 time with the biologist Roger Hanlon. Hanlon studies how cephalopods disguise…
February 18, 2008
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 backlog of tattoos to post there, which I will be doing so once at…
February 15, 2008
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 to it today in their weekly newsletter:
When most readers hear the words E.…
February 13, 2008
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 discovery of a fossil of an ancient whale that appears to…
February 11, 2008
It's time to add a new chapter to the Whale Chronicles....
...more below the fold...
Evidence from both DNA and fossils agree that whales evolved from hoofed mammals on land. At first they may have been occasional swimmers, only later evolving into meat-eaters hunting for prey in the water. Between…
February 7, 2008
Why are modern families so small? Could it have something in common with peacock tails? A fascinating essay in the new issue of Science is the basis of my newest column for Wired. And man oh man, are the commenters freaking out. Judge for yourself.
The Natural History of the Only Child
February 5, 2008
I've got some more information about my upcoming talks. On February 27, I'll be in Ottawa, delivering the Discovery Lecture at Carleton University. It will be called "The Darwin Beat: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Evolution." Here's the link to the lecture page.
More updates to come--I'll post…
February 5, 2008
Via Tara Smith, I learned of the passing of Joshua Lederberg. I came to appreciate the full scope of Lederberg's work while working on my book Microcosm; by discovering the secret sex life of E. coli, he helped build the science of molecular biology. It's sad to observe the passing of this…
February 4, 2008
I've got some more talks coming up that I want to let you know about--especially those of you around Lincoln, Nebraska or Sarasota, Florida--as well as those of you who like to go to meetings about parasites...
1. DARWIN DAY: I'll be doing my part to celebrate, at the University of Nebraska. My…
February 2, 2008
A quick favor from anyone who has read any of my books. If there's a passage--sentence to paragraph range--that you're fond of, can you let me know? I'm working on a project that requires a bunch of them. You can leave them in this post's comment thread or over on a discussion thread I set up on my…
February 2, 2008
University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward and I are talking again on bloggingheads--this time about aliens. Ward explains why science fiction writers hate him, and why we need to breed tiny astronauts if we ever want to get out of our solar system. Check it out.
Poster from Wikimedia…
February 1, 2008
I'm always learning something from the readers of the Loom. Yesterday, I wrote about how scientists had inserted their names into a synthetic genome, and how such signatures would erode away like graffiti inside real organisms. But how about the opposite case--what if evolution has produced…