loom | April 16, 2008Three 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 Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain-and How It Changed the World) describes a common, luxuriantly growing, usually benign gut bacterium, Escherichia coli, or E. coli. Easily grown in petri dishes, the species has alter egos that can kill its hosts, making the organism a useful laboratory model to explore the basis of heredity. Zimmer recounts…
loom | April 14, 2008I'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 also be talking about the experience of writing books about science. Of course, the first thing I'll have to confess is that most of the experience of writing Soul Made Flesh--going to libraries, paging through physical books--is already fairly obsolete.
If you live around Denver and are free at 12:30 pm Tuesday, come by. Here are the details.
loom | April 13, 2008Radiolab 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 brain waves from a sleeping cat. And so on.
I'm particularly fond of their latest podcast, which you can listen to below. It's about chimeras, synthetic biology, and other threats to our conventional notions of life.
Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Robert Krulwich, one of the hosts, and in recent months he and I have spent a fair amount of time…
loom | April 12, 2008
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.
loom | April 10, 2008
Yesterday is the birthday of the man who froze the gallop and thawed it out again.
From, of course, Wikipedia.
loom | April 4, 2008A 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.
loom | April 4, 2008My 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 it out.
[Image via Vesalius Gallery]
(update 4.4.08 9:30 am: link fixed)
loom | April 3, 2008In 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 Web which published in English online in 2007 will be considered. Entries should include up to six online articles, hypertextual documents, podcasts, commentaries, etc., or any combination thereof, that constitute a formal series or that may have appeared individually on a topic or common theme.
So if you haven't applied yet, now's your…
loom | March 31, 2008These 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 then I stumble across something new, or should I say, new to me.
This week's revelation is androgenesis. Androgenesis is what happens when kids get all their genes from their father. Normally humans and other animals produce offspring by combining DNA from both mother and father, an arrangement that's often the case in plants as well. Both sperm and eggs only get…
loom | March 31, 2008Greg left a comment:
You know, Carl, if you don't have one of these yet, you might consider picking one up to accompany you on your (hoped for) book tour.
Greg, I always try to find a plush toy related to my latest book. I think it's part of the late-stage madness that sets in during the third round of manuscript corrections. And E and me will be making the rounds in May to talk about Microcosm. So far, it looks like we're heading to New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. In the next couple weeks I'll have an official book tour schedule to post.
FYI, E. coli does…
loom | March 24, 2008My 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 homework. Nevertheless, I plan on recording some of my own previews of Microcosm between now and the publication date. Stay tuned.
loom | March 21, 2008My 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 engineered E. coli carrying DNA from a frog. The difference between such "unnatural" bacteria and "natural" ones may seem obvious, but today the dividing line is surprisingly tricky to draw, and will only get trickier. In my new column, I describe the first systematic attempt to do so. Check it out.
(Image…
loom | March 20, 2008Having 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 matter, so minute as to be borne by the wind, must multiply itself many thousandfold in a person thus inoculated; and so with the contagious matter of scarlet fever. It has recently been ascertained that a minute portion of the mucous discharge from an animal affected with rinderpest, if placed in…
loom | March 19, 2008Well, 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. coli known as O157:H7, which has caused outbreaks in recent years in contaminated foods. The weaponry it uses to attack and subvert our cells is quite impressive. But my respect went up a notch more when scientists recently reported how E. coli O157:H7 has been continuing to evolve into an even…
loom | 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.
loom | March 14, 2008Science 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]
loom | March 13, 2008If 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. I talk> about life as a multitasking freelancer, and how blog posts and books are and are not the same.
loom | March 10, 2008I'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.
loom | March 6, 2008How 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.
Photo: Luca Galluzi at Galuzzi.it [via Wikipedia]
loom | March 3, 2008My 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 Flesh at the University of Denver.
And plenty more coming in May and June...
[Update: I should also mention that if there's anyone interested in my giving a talk, the good people at the Knopf Speakers Bureau will be able to help you. ]