My talk with John Horgan on bloggingheads.tv is up. I’m sure the fact that the label “weird life” appears directly over my head was an accident (right, John?). Anyway, we had a good talk about parasites, aliens, and how to handle hype in science. I may have made some mistakes–feel free to fact-check in the comment thread. Unfortunately, I can’t strike out my spoken errors, but we can make the best of it. (If you hanker for more scienceblog/bloggingheads encounters, see these talks by PZ Myers and Chris Mooney.) 

Originally published September 29, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.

“My tattoo is from an Irving Geis illustration of DNA. I was attracted to his attention to the molecular detail while also drawing in a representational spiral that doesn’t ignore the basic beauty of the double helix. This particular sequence (I’ve BLASTED) is too short to be specific to only one gene, but one human gene it’s found it is the 5′ UTR of one of our tight junctions.”-Matthew MacDougall, 4th year medical student

Is there no end to the science tattoos out there?

See the 70 I’ve gotten so far at the Flickr set.

Continue reading “Science Tattoo Friday: A Textbook On Your Back” →

I’m going to be appearing this weekend on the strangely addictive show bloggingheads.tv. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show composed of two talking heads staring out of your screen at you, holding forth for an hour on whatever topic they choose (politics, television, science…). Actually, each speaker is staring into a computer camera and talking on the phone to his or her partner in chat. On Saturdays, two of our most provocative science writers, John Horgan and George Johnson, take to the tubes.

Continue reading “From blogger to blogginghead” →

It is a day to write about Giardia, and I am happy to say that I cannot do so from firsthand experience. Friends of mine have suffered infections of Giardia in their gut, but they haven’t been terribly forthcoming about the details. It’s not fun, they assure me, and it can last for months. Unpleasant as it may be up close, though, Giardia is one of the most fascinating, most enigmatic creatures on the planet (from a safe distance). Scientists do not yet quite know what to make of this single-celled parasite, but one possibility is that Giardia holds secrets to some of the key steps in the evolution of our own ancestors billions years ago.

Continue reading “Carrying Ancient History In The Gut” →

A while back I mentioned I’ve gotten a Facebook page and a Myspace page. They’ve been fun to toy around with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a harbinger of how we will all trawl for online information in the future. But to those who are asking to be friends at Myspace, leaving messages for me, or just wondeirng why the page is just so lame, I’m sorry to report that I haven’t been able to log in for a few days. If my kids were just a couple years older, I’m sure I’d have all the tech support I needed to deal with this. But for now, or at least until the MySpace minions come to my aid, it’s all about Facebook.

Continue reading “The Aging Brain Meets The Future of Social Networking” →