loom
Posts by this author
June 21, 2007
Last November, scientists announced they had revived a virus that had been dead for millions of years. The virus belongs to a special class that multiply by inserting their genetic code into the genome of their host cell. When the cell divides, it makes a new copy of the virus's genes along with…
June 19, 2007
Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith launched an interesting discussion by talking about why her heart doesn't automatically leap when a reporter wants to talk to her. That post was followed by a lot of scientists swearing up and down about the awful treatment they've experienced at the hands of reporters…
June 16, 2007
Today I jump sections at the New York Times. In the Week In Review, I take a look at the news of a bowhead whale that carried a harpoon tip for 115 years. It's a cool discovery, but 115 years is actually not extraordinarily long for a bowhead whale--or a rockeye rockfish. Both those animals can…
June 12, 2007
Nine years ago I had the opportunity to visit southern Sudan. With a few other reporters, I flew from Nairobi to Lokichokio in northern Kenya, where we prepared to cross the border. A man took our passports and told us he'd hold onto them till we got back. We climbed into another plane loaded with…
June 9, 2007
Whoosh. A year has passed since I got my passport stamped with a scienceblogs.com visa. Thanks to all who have come this way and shared your thoughts. May the next year bring more of life's surprises.
June 7, 2007
For the past few years, Craig Venter, the human genome pioneer, has been trying to build an organism from scratch. While Venter is no shrinking wallflower (see, for example, a recent interview in Newsweek), he has been keeping his synthetic-life cards pretty close to his vest. I spoke to Venter in…
June 5, 2007
Okay--we're moving again. I await your comments (as usual, there will be small delay for moderation.)
You'll have to make up for my appalling silence today as I work on (gasp) magazine articles. I know, I know, how very dead-tree of me....
June 5, 2007
Someone just emailed me to let me know she couldn't post a comment. For some reason that feature has shut itself down. I've been traveling, so it's taken me a while to start dealing with this. I'll let the Scienceblogs folks know of the problem, and let you know when it's resolved.
May 29, 2007
In about a month I'm heading to Colorado for the "Science and Media Summit" at the Aspen Science Center. The name may conjure up an image in your mind of a long table with diplomats from Science on one side and Media on the other, tensely negotiationg an end to some sort of bloodshed. As I…
May 23, 2007
A few months ago I got in my car and drove north until I reached a remarkable building filled with several million mice. At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, scientists are studying mice to understand many mysteries of genetics and medicine. But I was particularly curious about a project…
May 23, 2007
The paddlefish is a surreal giant, with a spatula-shaped nose that some scientists believe it uses to sense the electric fields of its prey, which it sucks up like a whale. You might not think of it as an animal that has much to offer in our quest to understand ourselves. But in fact, underneath…
May 21, 2007
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me quickly recap (and then, at your leisure, read this post.) Last November, my article on the evolution of complex features came out in National Geographic. A few weeks later the article inspired a long but baseless attack from the Discovery…
May 21, 2007
Jennifer Jacquet at SB blog Shifting Baselines just returned from the Galapagos, where she got the feeling that blogging has not made much of an impact, even among the scientists at the research stations. It left her wondering if science blogging is mainly restricted to the so-called "First World…
May 17, 2007
Why don't I blog more? In part because I'm busy reading other blogs. I finally got around to adding some of my favorite science blogs outside the scienceblogs.com empire to the blogroll over on the left side. Allow me to take a moment to introduce you to them.
The Anti-Toxo: A blog about every new…
May 17, 2007
I just wanted to take a moment to reiterate my longstanding policy on comments. I reserve the right to delete comments that are slanderous, obscene, or glaringly off-topic. I also reserve the right to ban commenters who do not follow these rules even after being reminded of them. Anyone who accepts…
May 11, 2007
Our culture wars make for strange ironies. The fight over the cervical cancer vaccine is a case in point.
Yesterday news broke that a vaccine for cervical cancer might not be all it's cracked up to be. Cervical cancer is caused by a virus known as human papillomavirus. It infects epithelial cells…
May 9, 2007
There was a time when the publication of the entire sequence of a genome--any genome--was exciting news. I don't have any particular passion about Haemophilus influenzae, a microbe that can cause the flu various infections. But in 1997 it was the first species to have its genome sequenced. It…
May 2, 2007
A bit of journalistic irony. Last week I groused that a new paper on methane from plants was getting very little attention in the press, despite the fact that it refutes a 2006 paper published in Nature that got lots of press. I wished aloud that the situation would be set right. Well, five days…
April 30, 2007
When you find yourself, as I did a few days ago, spending a morning watching the absurdly long phalluses of ducks being coaxed from their nether regions, you can find yourself wondering how your life ended up this way. Fortunately, there is a higher goal to such weirdness. The phalluses of ducks…
April 27, 2007
Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas.
You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists (mostly from the Max Planck Institute for…
April 25, 2007
Among the many obligations keeping me away from the blog is the nearly-completed overhaul of my web site, carlzimmer.com. Along with information on my books and talks, the site also has an archive of the past few years of my articles. I've made my way back to 2001, and I am continuing to push back…
April 17, 2007
It's getting harder and harder to remember what it was like to write about science in the pre-Web 2.0 days. Back then (i.e., 2004), I'd come across an intriguing paper, I'd interview the authors, I'd get comments--supportive or nasty--from other experts in the field, and then publish an article…
April 12, 2007
Trace your genealogy back 25 million years, and you'll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons--along with the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere…
April 6, 2007
At the end of February I joined John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, to talk to students at the New York University journalism program about blogging about science. There's a post about the talk now up, including some podcast excerpts, on the the Scienceline blog from the NYU…
April 6, 2007
Check this out. An international team of climate experts has been looking into the impact of climate on ecosystems, food production, and other aspects of the natural and human-controlled world. They've just come out with the executive summary of their contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on…
April 5, 2007
I've just spent part of this evening pondering a commentary in the new issue of the journal Science by fellow Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet called "Framing Science." (The paper is behind a firewall--yeck--but Matt has expounded on similar notes here.) They argue that scientists make…
April 3, 2007
Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom's favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior of its host. I reported on the research last June in the New York…
April 2, 2007
You may have read not long ago about birds that can plan for the future. The occasion was a paper that came out in the journal Nature detailing some experiments on scrub jays. I found the paper fascinating, not just for the results themselves, but for the many other studies on mental time travel…
April 2, 2007
There's nothing more grating for a science writer than see your work get cut and pasted to give people precisely the wrong impression. My latest irritation: "Ten Questions For Al Gore and the Global Warming Crowd", which appeared Friday on the conservative web site Townhall.com.
The author is John…
March 26, 2007
Before I head for Utah, let me direct your attention to two articles of mine in tomorrow's New York Times. They don't have a whole lot in common except they are examples of cool biology...
1. Virus traps. Here's a case where ecology, evolution, and medicine all come together in an intriguing mix.…