A bit of journalistic irony. Last week I groused that a new paper on methane from plants was getting very little attention in the press, despite the fact that it refutes a 2006 paper published in Nature that got lots of press. I wished aloud that the situation would be set right. Well, five days later, a few more sites have published the press release, but I’ve only seen one new piece of original reporting.

It appears in the news section of today’s issue of Nature. Hats off to Nature for making room for some uncomfortable news.

Continue reading “Methane News: Not Quite So Missing” →

When you find yourself, as I did a few days ago, spending a morning watching the absurdly long phalluses of ducks being coaxed from their nether regions, you can find yourself wondering how your life ended up this way. Fortunately, there is a higher goal to such weirdness. The phalluses of ducks are just the tip of an evolutionary iceberg. The female ducks have their own kinkiness, too. It’s all part of a fierce avian battle of the sexes.

For the latest, see my article in tomorrow’s New York Times. The paper on which it is based appears in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Continue reading “Kinkiness, Thy Name Is Duck” →

Here’s a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn’t: a new study indicates that plants don’t release lots of methane gas.

You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists (mostly from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas–perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.

Continue reading “The Missing News of the Missing Methane” →

Among the many obligations keeping me away from the blog is the nearly-completed overhaul of my web site, carlzimmer.com. Along with information on my books and talks, the site also has an archive of the past few years of my articles. I’ve made my way back to 2001, and I am continuing to push back further. It’s a strange experience to look back over many dozens of stories that all seemed rather cutting-edge at the time. In some cases, they’ve been outstripped so starkly by later research that they seem almost like time capsules now. In other cases, further research hasn’t really pushed the boundary of knowledge much more.

Continue reading “Penguins, Chimpanzees, and Other Old Friends” →

It’s getting harder and harder to remember what it was like to write about science in the pre-Web 2.0 days. Back then (i.e., 2004), I’d come across an intriguing paper, I’d interview the authors, I’d get comments–supportive or nasty–from other experts in the field, and then publish an article distilling everything I’d learned. It would take months or years for the authors to follow up on their work or for other scientists to publish their own papers attacking or supporting the original research.

Continue reading “When Scientists Go All Bloggy” →