Greetings–
I’m back, with some further reading for your enjoyment and edification (I hope!).
Have you ever heard of Wolbachia? If not, you have a wonderful surprise in store. It’s arguably the most successful symbiont on Earth, a species of bacteria that lives inside several million species of invertebrates. And it thrives in those hosts with weird manipulations of their reproduction. I’ve written about Wolbachia a few times in the past (here for example), and this week in the New York Times I revisit it to explore an exciting possibility: that Wolbachia could block mosquito-borne diseases including Zika and dengue fever. Check it out.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned I was going to talk with historian Daniel Kevles about the past and future of human engineering. Emily McManus, the editor of ted.com, came to the event, and has written up this excellent piece about it.
On April 25, I participated in a day-long meeting about how to tell the stories of science, hosted by National Geographic and Yale. The videos are now up on this page. I talk in this session (it’s the third video on the meeting page). David Quammen’s keynote on writing about Yellowstone is here.
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
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published May 6, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.