A couple months ago, I wrote a feature for Discover about the intriguing possibility that life might have originated more than once on Earth–and that maybe those alternative life forms were still alive among us today. Paul Davies, one of the scientists who has explored this idea in recent years, has written an account of it that’s the cover story of this month’s Scientific American. Check it out. Davies offers some neat possibilities, such as the notion that living things might use arsenic instead of phosphorus to store energy. One creature’s poison…

Originally published November 20, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.

My fellow bloggingheads John Horgan and George Johnson took some time on their latest science talk to dissect my New York Times article on swarms (you can jump to that section here). John wonders if I’m just discovering all the complexity stuff he and George were writing about back in the 1990s. I think it’s always good for John to keep everyone aware of the dangers of hype, of the need to ask how important or new scientific research really is. He’s been particularly tough on the science of complexity, if there is such a thing. In 1995 he wrote a piece in Scientific American that practically brought tears to the eyes of many scientists who thought complexity was the Next Big Thing.

Continue reading “That Old Time Complexity” →

I’m back from California and the award ceremony I mentioned last week. The trip was fun but a little absurd–I flew across the country and back within 36 hours. It’s time for some serious carbon offsetting. I got to hang out with ABC’s Robert Krulwich without having to go into a forest, and was finally able to put a face to RadioLab‘s Jad Abumrad’s incantory voice. I find I can never, ever predict what someone looks like from how they sound on the radio.Eric Kandel came to pick up a prize for his book, In Search of Memory . During a discussion with some journalism students, he and I got into a spirited debate about what science writing is for. He thought it should educate a public seriously in need of education. I said that’s what high school is for. 

Continue reading “Back on the Ground” →

Not much blogging this week–I’m heading out to California to receive the National Academies prize I wrote about a while back. In the meantime, let me direct your attention to my lead article in this week’s Science Times section of the NY Times. I wrote about swarms, herds, schools, gaggles, and other crowds of animals, focusing on one of the scientists who studies them, Iain Couzin. If you want to find out more about his quest to find the underlying rules of swarm intelligence, check out his web site.

Continue reading “Rules of the Swarm” →