Author: Lori Jia
The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives–professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow’s New York Times about moray eels. It turns out that they have bizarre jaws hidden in their throats that catapult forward into their mouth to grab prey.
Continue reading “Alien Eels, Pufferfish, and Other Novelties”
What do human spit, baker’s yeast, and fly sex have in common? Together, they illustrate a way in which new kinds of genes evolve.
Scientists published a paper in Nature Genetics Sunday in which they studied an enzyme called amylase that’s produced in saliva and breaks down starch. Human amylase genes share a common ancestry with the amylase gene found in our close relative, the chimpanzee. But they are different in some important ways. Instead of one amylase gene, we have several. Human amylase genes range from 2 to 15 copies, averaging three times as many as chimpanzees.
Continue reading “Today’s Odd Bedfellows: Spit, Yeast, and Mating Flies”
Science Made Cool writes from Tokyo, describing the world’s only parasite museum. Someday I’ll get there…
Sadly, the keychain with the sushi worm embedded inside is not for sale online…
Update: Mark asks whether there’s an American museum in Maryland. It’s a collection, not a museum. I write about my visit there in Parasite Rex. A wonderfully creepy place, but no parasite-entombing keychains for sale.
Originally published September 8, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Your scientific body art just keeps getting more attention. Can I just say that, as a science writer, I find it strange to get calls from other reporters wanting to interview me about other people’s tattoos? Who put that in my job description? Anyway, here are a few links–
Wired: The Coolest Science Tattoos
Metro (UK newspaper): Sci-ink-tific tattoos all the rage
Chemical and Engineering News: Science Tattoos
I want to give readers of the Loom a heads up about book that I’ve edited that’s coming out in November. The author is a very interesting writer named Charles Darwin.
In 1871 Charles Darwin published pretty much his first and last word about human evolution: The Descent of Man. It’s a marvelous, but sometimes maddening book. Darwin did a remarkably good job of hypothesizing how humans evolved, especially when you consider that barely any hominid fossils had yet been found. But Darwin packed the book with detail, a lot of it having to do with all sorts of animals other than Homo sapiens.