In yet another sign of the growing respectability of the online world for communicating science, this year the National Academies have set up a new “online/Internet” category for their annual communication prize. Here’s what they want:

Entries original to the Web which published in English online in 2007 will be considered. Entries should include up to six online articles, hypertextual documents, podcasts, commentaries, etc., or any combination thereof, that constitute a formal series or that may have appeared individually on a topic or common theme.

Continue reading “In Search of Online Excellence” →

These biologists are holding out on me.

I’ve been writing about biology for quite some time now, and sometimes I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of the scope of life. Neurosurgeon wasps–got it. Eels with alien jaws–check. And then I stumble across something new, or should I say, new to me.

This week’s revelation is androgenesis. Androgenesis is what happens when kids get all their genes from their father. Normally humans and other animals produce offspring by combining DNA from both mother and father, an arrangement that’s often the case in plants as well. 

Continue reading “All Dad” →

Greg left a comment:

You know, Carl, if you don’t have one of these yet, you might consider picking one up to accompany you on your (hoped for) book tour.

Greg, I always try to find a plush toy related to my latest book. I think it’s part of the late-stage madness that sets in during the third round of manuscript corrections. And E and me will be making the rounds in May to talk about Microcosm. So far, it looks like we’re heading to New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. In the next couple weeks I’ll have an official book tour schedule to post.

Continue reading “Me and E” →

Aarn writes:

“As a student of electrical and mechanical engineering I kept running into sine waves and the unit circle, and came to realize how important it is. After about a year of digging and trying to find the right artist and the right technical drawings to illustrate this concept, I settled on two images which at one time or another were featured in scientific american magazine. The inner arm is a sine wave as it relates to the unit circle, and I continued the wave theme on the whole arm piece with the outer image which is the superposition of two waves. In the background is kind of a broken-out grid that wraps around my arm and onto my shoulder and has other solid and dotted lines in it.”

Continue reading “Crashing Waves” →

Mike writes:

“Otzi was discovered on a glacier in the Austrian-Italian alps by a couple of hikers – his body was well-preserved along with many of his possessions. On his skin there were something like 50 tattoos, I got 10 of the lines on my back in the same place he had his. — I figure you can spiff up the facts when you actually blog this.

Anyway, Otzi was human, 100% human, 100% genetically identical to modern humans today, genetically identical to us, to me. Despite being the same species, we live in a completely different way than he does.

Continue reading “The Mark of the Iceman” →