Author: Lori Jia
I’ve set up a web page for the workshop I’ll be teaching at Yale next month. If I had to sum up my line of work in four hours, a few things to read, and one writing assignment, this would probably be it.
Originally published December 8, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Here is my first obituary in the New York Times, for Seymour Benzer. (It was pure coincidence, apparently, that they contacted me a couple days after I blogged about Benzer here.) It’s a nerve-racking experience summing up someone’s life in a few hundred words, especially a life as jam-packed as Benzer’s. Here’s one of many things that didn’t make it in: Benzer’s quest to find the genetic basis for loving spicy Asian food (via Jim Hu)
Originally published December 7, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
“I did my Ph. D on olfaction in sea turtles, sequencing the olfactory receptor genes of the three species featured in my tattoo (leatherback, loggerhead and green). The “bubbles” represent DNA.”–Dr. Michelle Vieyra, University of South Carolina.
Congratulations, Dr. Vierya–your submission is the 100th addition to my Flickr set of science tattoos. Make full use of your bragging rights.
[See also New Scientist’s droll blog coverage of this project.]
Back in 2005 my daughter Charlotte, then a four-year-old, took part in a study to see how kids stack up mentally against chimpanzees. I wrote about the ambivalent experience of watching her as both a father and a curious science writer in the New York Times. The emerging lesson of the study, led by Yale grad student Derek Lyons, was that children overimitate even though they should know better. Lyons showed the children how to get a toy out of a container, adding in lots of unnecessary tapping of walls and sliding of rods and such. Other scientists had tested chimpanzees on similar contraptions and found that they pay more attention to the basic mechanics of the task at hand. As a result, the chimps generally leave kids in the dust (Charlotte included).
My latest conversation at bloggingheads is up–a discussion of stem cell biology and politics with Lee Silver, Princeton biologist and author of Challenging Nature. Check it out.
Originally published December 4, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.