loom | March 3, 2008Hyenas 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 their brains. The same social forces were at work in our own ancestors. Humans and hyenas, in other words, have been rolling on parallel evolutionary tracks.
For further details, check out the densely packed web site of Kay Holekamp, the biologist who has been investigating the social hyena brain.…
loom | March 1, 2008When 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 talk today on bloggingheads with Mike Gazzaniga.
(And if you want to see what Mike was like as a young post-doc 50 years ago, check out this video from the early1960s about his split brain research. It's also evidence of how much science documentaries have changed...)
loom | February 26, 2008The 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 take this baby out for a ride. Deepak Singh at business bytes genes molecules has some complaints, and Rod Page has a lot of them. It will take a little time to sort out these comments into the constructive criticisms and the outright dismissals. For example, I'm sure that it wouldn't take too long…
loom | February 25, 2008My 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 different species. Will it reach its goal? As I point out in the article, previous attempts have failed. Their remnants are littered across the Web, such as the All-Species Foundation. But the scientists behind the Encyclopedia of Life have a lot of tools, like wikis and text-mining, that their…
loom | 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 young American biologist named James Watson. The two soon discover they share a curiosity about a strange molecule called DNA. And on a warm afternoon in the early spring of 1838, the young Charles Darwin climbed into an orangutan's cage.
That's the start of my introduction to the recently published…
loom | February 23, 2008It'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
loom | February 22, 2008In 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 couple of meagre (though nice in themselves) wedges of pictures in the middle. When I'm reading about the different stages parasites go through and so on I want to see it - I want to see the flukes pouring from the toad and all that. And I want books that visitors will ohh and ahh (and eww) over,…
loom | February 22, 2008Let'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!)
loom | February 18, 2008For 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 themselves, and boy do they ever. Right in front of your eyes, sitting in a little tub of water, the animals can practically disappear. Or, if they want to scare you, they turn a chocolately brown with bright stripes.
After my visit, I wrote a profile of Hanlon, which is the lead article in tomorrow's…
loom | 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 day--with an increasing amount of my own commentary on the story behind the picture.
loom | February 15, 2008After 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. coli, they think tainted hamburger or toxic spinach. Noted science writer Zimmer says there are in fact many different strains of E. coli, some coexisting quite happily with us in our digestive tracts. These rod-shaped bacteria were among the first organisms to have their genome mapped, and today…
loom | 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 have had both teeth and baleen. Today's news takes us from the sea to the trees--the fossil of a primitive bat. The transition that the ancestors of bats made from scampering shrew-like mammals to masterful flyers has remained particularly mysterious. Today's new fossil lets us look back further than…
loom | February 11, 2008It'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 about 50 and 40 million years ago, they became increasingly adapted to the sea. Paleontologists have found fossils of dozens of species of early whales documenting this transition.
Most of those lineages of early whales became extinct. Living whales belong to only two lineages that emerged about…
loom | February 7, 2008Why 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
loom | February 5, 2008I'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 them here, over at carlzimmer.com, and on Facebook.
Update--Talk link fixed...
loom | February 5, 2008Via 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 scientific cohort who together uncovered some of the fundamental secrets of life, including Lederberg's wife Esther, Seymour Benzer, and Francis Crick. Today we live in an age of big biology; Lederberg won his Nobel prize in large part for the work he did in near solitude as a graduate student. We may not…
loom | February 4, 2008I'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 talk will be this Friday. I'll be talking about what bacteria could have taught Darwin about evolution--drawing in part from my upcoming book, Microcsom. Here's the UNL link with details (Facebook event).
2. THE ORIGIN OF WHALES: Mote Marine Laboratory runs a great series of public lectures. On March…
loom | February 2, 2008A 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 Facebook writer's page, or--if you'd prefer not to air such things in public--you can email me. Thanks!
loom | February 2, 2008University 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 Commons, Headline Defiled From Shelley
loom | February 1, 2008I'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 sequences of DNA that happen to form words?
In the comment thread, Peter Ellis asked,
What actually is the longest word (in any language) encoded by the reference human genome? If I had the time and computer power I'd have a look...
Guesstimate - it'll be somewhere in the 4-5 letter range, depending on…