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.
Author: Lori Jia
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”
It’s a brave new world for us book authors. Today’s case in point: PZ Myers assigned some of his students to ready my book Soul Made Flesh, which chronicles how humanity figured out what the brain is for. Some of his students have bravely agreed to post their reports on the book on Myers’s blog Pharyngula (here and here). The comment thread has turned into a wide-ranging book-club discussion. I’m chiming in from time to time too (here and here, for example). I’m definitely enjoying it and will check in as long as the discussion goes.
Originally published September 21, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Mark sent this picture in, with this explanation:
I don’t quite have a science tattoo, but I have a math tattoo. That’s close enough, right?
Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.
The Scientist recently asked me to name the three best life-science blogs. I just sent them three ones I enjoy and read a lot–I find this sort of ranking to be interesting but fundamentally artificial. (I’d recommend all of the blogs on my blogroll on the left of your screen.)
I didn’t realize that the request was actually part of a bigger undertaking: the Scientist is asking all of its readers to pick the best life-science blogs. If you want to help make the selection, click here forthwith.
Originally published September 19, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.