Author: Lori Jia
If you live anywhere near my home town of Guilford, Connecticut, I’d be delighted if you could join me Thursday at 7:30 at the Guilford Free Library for a talk, “Will Global Warming Redraw the Map of Life?” (flyer pdf) I’ll be discussing extinction projections, assisted migration, and more.
Originally published October 16, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values which are in the interior of one of the subdomains of the connectedness locus, the Julia set is a Universal Curve. To me this represents the structure unifying chaos (since Julia sets are chaotic) and order (since Universal Curves act as a sort of catalog of all planar curves).–Aaron
Continue reading “Science Tattoo Friday: Chaos And Order Battle For Aaron’s Back”
We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly’s wings. But a lot of nature’s intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker’s yeast that makes bread rise and beer ferment. At an audition for a David Attenborough documentary, a yeast cell guzzling away on sugar is bound to do a lousy job. (“Thanks, don’t call us; we’ll call you. Send in the King Cobra!”) But the intricacy of its metabolism is no less impressive. What’s more, scientists know how to manipulate yeast in ways they can’t with animals, and that power lets them set up experiments that yield clues to how that intricacy evolved.
Science writer Jessica Snyder Sachs has an interesting op-ed in today’s New York Times, explaining why you should get your flu shot and skip the chicken pox parties. It’s a taste of the material in her excellent new book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for the book.)
Originally published October 10, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Chris Sloan, a senior editor at National Geographic Magazine, points me to a cluster of new blogs he and others at NG have just launched. Sloan’s own blog includes a refreshingly frank discussion of the forged-fossil controversy NG was involved in a few years ago.
Science Blogs meanwhile continued to absorb blogs in Borg-like fashion. Among the new additions is one I’ve followed for a while, Laelaps, which covers stuff like fossil horses, human evolution, and such. Long live the organisms.
Continue reading “Link Love: National Geographic Blogs and A New Sibling”