Greetings–
 

Getting Astronaut Blood From Space

I’ve got a new video out in my Science Happens series for Stat. This time, I paid a visit to the lab of Chris Mason in New York, where he and his colleagues are studying blood and other samples from astronaut Scott Kelly. They’re examining his DNA to see if life in space brings about any changes in how his genes work. Check it out. (GIF from NASA)

The Mystery of the Dwindling Red Knot

Climate change is altering the natural world in ways we’re just beginning to reckon with. A new study shows that it may be wreaking havoc with one of the greatest migrations in the animal kingdom. For my column this week in the New York Times, I take a look at the mystery of a shrinking shorebird.

 

Three Years!

This week marks the three-year anniversary of “Matter,” my weekly column for the Times. In May 2013, I kicked things off with a column about the 13-year cycle of cicadas. And here’s a video of a talk I had at the time about the column with my editor, Michael Mason. I’m incredibly grateful to Mike and the editorial team at the Science Times for giving me such a fantastic sandbox to play in, and look forward to many more surprising stories.

 

The Talks

June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award. Details here

June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here’s the meeting site.

June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, “Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA.” Details here.

July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah. The talk is entitled, “Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany”

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
 

The End
 
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Best wishes, Carl

Originally published May 13, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.