Greetings–
Thanks to everyone who responded about the pacing of Friday’s Elk. I’ve decided to keep sending it out every week, although there may be a week here or there where I’ll have to let a Friday slip by.
–This week, I’d like to draw your attention to crows.
Scientists have amassed a fascinating heap of evidence that crows and their corvid relatives have sophisticated brains, which they use to make tools, remember the location of hundreds of seed caches, distinguish between individual human faces, and so on. For my latest “Matter” column in The New York Times, I look at a particularly exceptional capacity of crows: their ability to pay careful attention to their dead. Check it out.
–On Wednesday, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be announced. Thompson Reuters predicts the scientists who developed the gene editing technique called CRISPR will win. That would be pretty astonishing, given that the technique is just a few years old, but the power of CRISPR cannot be denied. If you want to get up to speed in advance of this likely outcome, check out my story on how CRISPR was discovered (not invented), and this conversation about CRISPR I had with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich on RadioLab.
–Now that Hurricane Joaquin seems to be heading safely out to sea, I’m heading to the American Society for Human Genetics meeting next week. To any geneticists going there who are reading this: Let me know what you’ll be presenting!
–To any science writers heading to ScienceWriters 2015 next Friday, please consider joining me for a panel discussion about Stat, the new publication for which I’m now a national correspondent. See here for how to register.
–And, finally, here’s a list of other upcoming talks…
October 21, Farmington, Connecticut, at the Jackson Laboratory: “From Viruses to Whales, From Newspapers to Twitter: A Career in Science Writing.” Details here.
October 24, Pittsburgh: A discussion about the future of DNA editing at the annual conference of the National Society of Genetics Counselors.
November 13, Providence, RI, at the National Association of Biology Teachers: I’ll be giving a talk in conjunction with receiving their Distinguished Service Award.
November 19, the New York City Genome Center: A panel discussion on “Jewish genomics” Details here.
January 28, the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ: Details to come.
That’s it. As always, if you have friends whom would you think would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.
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Best wishes, Carl
Originally published October 2, 2015. Copyright 2015 Carl Zimmer.