loom | September 17, 2007I just took a survey about blogs about science, and you should too. Here's the description:
This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey are completing an academic manuscript on the impact of science blogging and this survey will provide invaluable data to answer the following questions:
Who reads or writes blogs?
What are the perceptions of blogging, and what are the views of those who read blogs?
How do academics and others perceive science blogging?
What, if any,…
loom | September 16, 2007You may be familiar with Pulse of the Planet as a radio show about nature, but Jim Metzner, its producer, just let me know that it now sports a pretty extensive web site, including a selection of diaries from scientists studying everything from lightning to sea turtles. Check it out.
loom | September 13, 2007"Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It's the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species." --Julienne
We're up to 64 tattoos in the flickr set, which has been seen by over 96,000 people since I set it up last month (which doesn't count the 130,000+ pageviews of the original post). I think I'll just post my favorite of the week each Friday until people stop sending them to me.
(See Darwin's original…
loom | September 10, 2007The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives--professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow's New York Times about moray eels. It turns out that they have bizarre jaws hidden in their throats that catapult forward into their mouth to grab prey.
If you read other blogs at Scienceblogs, this may sound like slightly old news. That's because the paper describing this research came out on Wednesday in the journal Nature, and…
loom | September 10, 2007What do human spit, baker's yeast, and fly sex have in common? Together, they illustrate a way in which new kinds of genes evolve.
Scientists published a paper in Nature Genetics Sunday in which they studied an enzyme called amylase that's produced in saliva and breaks down starch. Human amylase genes share a common ancestry with the amylase gene found in our close relative, the chimpanzee. But they are different in some important ways. Instead of one amylase gene, we have several. Human amylase genes range from 2 to 15 copies, averaging three times as many as chimpanzees. But our extra…
loom | September 8, 2007Science Made Cool writes from Tokyo, describing the world's only parasite museum. Someday I'll get there...
Sadly, the keychain with the sushi worm embedded inside is not for sale online...
Update: Mark asks whether there's an American museum in Maryland. It's a collection, not a museum. I write about my visit there in Parasite Rex. A wonderfully creepy place, but no parasite-entombing keychains for sale.
loom | September 7, 2007Your scientific body art just keeps getting more attention. Can I just say that, as a science writer, I find it strange to get calls from other reporters wanting to interview me about other people's tattoos? Who put that in my job description? Anyway, here are a few links--
Wired: The Coolest Science Tattoos
Metro (UK newspaper): Sci-ink-tific tattoos all the rage
Chemical and Engineering News: Science Tattoos
Long Island Press: "These pics, collected by science writer Carl Zimmer, capture nerdiness in its most badass form."
So, if you want the world to see your inky love of science, send in…
loom | September 6, 2007I want to give readers of the Loom a heads up about book that I've edited that's coming out in November. The author is a very interesting writer named Charles Darwin.
In 1871 Charles Darwin published pretty much his first and last word about human evolution: The Descent of Man. It's a marvelous, but sometimes maddening book. Darwin did a remarkably good job of hypothesizing how humans evolved, especially when you consider that barely any hominid fossils had yet been found. But Darwin packed the book with detail, a lot of it having to do with all sorts of animals other than Homo sapiens. I've…
loom | September 6, 2007At about a pound and a half, Mahakala omnogovae was certainly a cute dinosaur. But cuteness is not why paleontologists traveled to the remote ends of Mongolia to find it. It's part of a much bigger story.
Paleontologists have known for a while now that birds evolved from one group of dinosaurs called theropods--the two-legged beasts that include the likes of Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. But precisely which lineage of theropods birds belong to has been the subject of a lot of debate. These debates, like all debates in science, are fueled by uncertainty. Paleontologists can base their…
loom | September 6, 2007I think he may be under the influence.
If not, thanks.
Okay--narcissism stops...now.
loom | September 5, 2007Earlier this summer my cover story on the meaning of life (or, at least, "life") came out in the July/August issue of Seed. Now, at long last, the Seedsters have posted the story online. Read it here.
loom | September 4, 2007
"I'm an evolutionary biologist who investigates the evolution of sperm form, sperm-female interactions and sperm competition. So...yeah, it's pretty much about sperm. Wanted to bring the concept of the homunculus to life, as all illustrations of it have always been rather cartoonish." --Scott Pitnick, Syracuse University
The science tattoo collection now has 56 images. See the full set at flickr. Any more illustrated lurkers out there?
loom | September 4, 2007Driving home at the end of the long weekend, I was amazed to see a tree here and there along the road with a touch of orange in its leaves. Fall already. And with fall comes another team of scientists to puzzle over why leaves change color.
I've been following this story for four autumns now, both in the New York Times, and in a series of blog posts (one, two, three, and four). It began with a simple question from one of the great evolutionary biologists since Darwin. William Hamilton argued that it takes a lot of energy for autumn leaves to produce the brilliant pigments that make fall so…
loom | August 31, 2007 I've been a bit of a slave to trends recently. Everybody else has a Facebook page, so I guess I need one too--even if I don't quite know what to do with it. Myspace? Uh, okay...
As with so many things in the human experience, great or small, we are not quite alone when it comes to trend-following--as I explain in my latest column for Forbes. Check it out.
Per usual, here are some of the sources I used for the piece:
Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups [The evolution of animal "cultures" and social intelligence
Spread of arbitrary conventions among…
loom | August 27, 2007Here is a lovely little creature from Sri Lanka, Pettalus cf. cimiciformis, a member of the same lineage that includes the daddy longlegs we're all familiar with. You could call it a daddy longlegs too, but its legs aren't particularly long (plus it's tiny--the size of a sesame seed.)
It may not seem like much, but it poses a fascinating riddle. It belongs to a family of daddy longlegs called Petallidae. Below is a map of where other species of Petallidae can be found. They seem to be scattered randomly across the world. But petallids are terrible at dispersing. Their ranges are small (…
loom | August 23, 2007As I've mentioned before, my brother Ben also blogs. An editor at Oxford American Dictionaries, he writes about words over at "From A to Zimmer." Not surprisingly, our blogs usually don't overlap. But Ben's latest entry--on very, very long words, has prompted me to pose a question of my own here.
In his post, "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism!", Ben points out that a lot of the longest words are, as he puts it, "stunt words." They're cobbled together from prefixes and suffixes, but never actually used in real life. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalianism is a case in point--a word that is used to…
loom | August 21, 2007Here's the latest addition to the Loom's science tattoo collection: from a food scientist, the molecule capsaicin, which makes chiles spicy.
To see all the new tattoos, check out my Flickr set. And keep them coming--either in the comment thread here, or emailed directly to me.
If you crave more science tattoos--not just on the body, but of the body, check out an awesome collection of anatomical tattoos. (Thanks to Steve)
loom | August 20, 2007I've got a story in the current issue of Science about the challenge of predicting how many species (and which) may become extinct due to global warming. You can read the article here on my web site. I blogged about some of the early material in the article back in 2004 here. For a good summary of the qualms many scientists have about the power of current models, check out this recent review in the journal Bioscience: pdf.
[Update: If for some reason you have trouble reading my article on my web site, the link to the story at Science is here.]
loom | August 19, 2007My wife and I were following our children across Appledore Island, reaching a crest where we could see the mainland coast--Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine all stretched out in a single sweep--when a woman in bloody surgical gear stepped out into our path. She warned us that behind the old radar tower next to us some pathologists were cutting open a seal. It would be a good idea if we steered the children away.
Naturally, I let my wife head on with the kids and snuck around the tower to check out the necropsy for myself...
There, on an open porch, a dozen people huddled around a table…
loom | August 13, 2007Parasitoid wasps (or rather, one group of them called the Ichneumonidae) are the subject of one of Charles Darwin's most famous quotations: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars."
Scientists have learned a lot more about parasitoid wasps since Darwin wrote about them in 1860, and their elegant viciousness is now even more staggering to behold. Not only do they devour their hosts alive from the inside out, but they also manipulate the…