Author: Lori Jia
Science writer Peter Dizikes reviews my book Microcosm for the New York Times. It’s great to see that he gets it–i.e., he understands what I’m trying to do with E. coli in the book. I actually appreciate that more than a positive review. Fortunately, he liked the book, too, calling it engrossing, vivid, and adroit. Check it out.
Originally published June 28, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
I’m back on bloggingheads.tv, talking this week with Paul Ehrlich about everything from climate change to Polynesian canoe oars to the origins of human culture to why cars are best for teenagers to make out in. Check it out.
Originally published June 28, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
MLR writes: “The Tree of Life” carbon, glucose, light, DNA, and the golden rectangle. A tattoo by Kevin Riley. On the chest of a PhD student in molecular biology.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published June 27, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
It feels like a homecoming: I’m among hundreds of people who live for parasites.
I arrived in Arlington Texas this afternoon to attend the annual meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists. I’m going to give a talk tomorrow about the public awareness of parasitology, talking about my long-term relationship with the beasties in books, articles, blogs, and beyond. But till then, I get to hang out with parasitologists. I’ve met a lot of the people here over the years, like the leech-master Mark Siddall, and I’ve read the work of a lot of people I’m just meeting (work on things like how lice jumped from gorillas to human ancestors).
Continue reading “Nice and Weird: Dispatches from The Depths of Parasitology”
In 1980, Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues proposed that the dinosaurs had been exterminated by an asteroid that smashed into the Earth. I was fourteen at the time, and that mix of dinosaurs, asteroids, and apocalyptic explosions was impossible to resist. I can still see the pictures that appeared in magazines and books–paintings of crooked rocks crashing into Earth, sometimes seen from the heavens, sometimes from the point of view of an about-to-become-extinct dinosaur. Suddenly the history of life was more cinematic than any science fiction movie.