My latest story for the New York Times is up: it’s a sneak peek at the Encyclopedia of Life–a web site that will ultimately contain detailed pages about all 1.8 million known species. Right now it’s just a demo site, but on Thursday, there will be thousands of pages up, each with details on a different species. Will it reach its goal? As I point out in the article, previous attempts have failed. Their remnants are littered across the Web, such as the All-Species Foundation. But the scientists behind the Encyclopedia of Life have a lot of tools, like wikis and text-mining, that their predecessors lacked. Check it out on Thursday and come back here to tell me what you think.
Author: Lori Jia
Helen writes, “I am getting married soon, and I wanted to get a tattoo to commemorate who I was before, something to remember my old name (as I am going to take my future husband’s surname when I get married), but I also wanted it to be a secret. So this is what I got…”
Carl: Helen wrote her name in ASCII, the lingua franca of computers. Before ASCII was developed in the 1960s, computers often had no way to send text to one another, with dozens of different systems for representing letters and numbers. Even after ASCII was created, it didn’t become common until 1981, when IBM used it for the first personal computers. Now ASCII is ubiquitous–a rare thing for such an old computer technology.
The history of science is rife with fateful meetings. The astronomer Tycho Brahe hires a young assistant named Johannes Kepler, who will go on to discover in Brahe’s observations the law of planetary motion. A bright but aimless British physicist named Francis Crick is introduced to a boisterous young American biologist named James Watson. The two soon discover they share a curiosity about a strange molecule called DNA. And on a warm afternoon in the early spring of 1838, the young Charles Darwin climbed into an orangutan’s cage.
It’s fun to write about discoveries, but mysteries are important too. In my latest column for Wired.com, I explore the mysterious death of honeybees, and the trouble scientists are having pinning down a culprit.
Honey Bees Give Clues on Virus Spread
Originally published February 23, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
In the comment thread for my post about Microcosm’s rave review in Publisher’s Weekly, outeast writes,
There’s been something I’ve been dying for, and here’s as good a place as any to mention it: real coffee-table editions of your books, meaning lavishly illustrated throughout rather than with a couple of meagre (though nice in themselves) wedges of pictures in the middle. When I’m reading about the different stages parasites go through and so on I want to see it – I want to see the flukes pouring from the toad and all that. And I want books that visitors will ohh and ahh (and eww) over, books that will last for years and that my kids will stumble across a decade from now and show to their fascinated and horrified friends… Pretty pretty please, do tell your publisher!!
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