An anonymous reader writes, “The Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 was one of the big events that really got me into science and astronomy. My dad and I went to our local planetarium, which was live-streaming the images from NASA as they came in. Even though I don’t really work in astronomy now, I wanted a tattoo to commemorate my continued love of astronomy and one of my dearest childhood memories. My tattoo is the Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune and Triton.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Originally published February 28, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

[Correction appended]

I guess I don’t understand editorial pages. The laws of physics must be different there.

Chapter 1: A Correction

On February 15, George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post, in which he scoffed at dire warnings about the effects of global warming. He claimed that environmental pessimists are always warning about catastrophes that never come. And he offered a series of claims about the climate that added up to a larger claim about the lack of evidence of global warming. For example:

Continue reading “Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters” →

Last week I dedicated a few posts (1, 2, 3, 4) to a column by George Will on global warming as an example of why fact-checking is important. The whole thing flared up a lot more than I had expected, with the Washington Post editorial page folks actually claiming they had fact checked Will through a “multi-layered” fact-checking process. (Unfortunately, no one bothered to pick up a phone to call a research center cited in the piece.) Etc., etc.

I’ve been too busy with many deadlines on other projects to keep close track of this any longer, but I just had to pass on this bit of news from Talking Points Memo: George Will is back, baby!

Continue reading “George Will: Locked In Ice!” →

Here are excerpts from the panel discussion on the brain I moderated at the Franklin Institute. The scurrilous rumor about me and toy soldiers pops up about 4 minutes into Sam Wang’s discussion of false memories. 

Originally published February 26, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

My latest book, Microcosm, is about what it means to be alive, as seen from the point of view of E. coli. So it was a jolt to the system to discover that the guy who basically wrote the book on E. coli has just reviewed it for the American Society for Microbiology’s journal, Microbe. Frederick Neidhardt of the University of Michigan is the editor-in-chief of Escherichia coli and Salmonella: Cellular and Molecular Biology. I relied on this 2898-page tome a lot while I worked on Microcosm, lugging the two volumes off the shelf at the Yale med school library and dropping them with a crash on my table.

Continue reading “A “Whoa…” Review of Microcosm” →