Author: Lori Jia
[Correction appended]
There’s been a wrinkle in the global warming fact-checking saga I’ve been following this week.
Just to recap–George Will wrote a column claiming that global warming’s a lot of hype. He made a number of misleading statements, including one that was rejected by the very scientists he claimed as his source.
Will stated, “According to the University of Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”
While recovering from an extracted wisdom tooth this morning, I cheered up when I saw that Talking Points Memo and other blogs have picked up my grousing about George Will’s error-laden global warming column in the Washington Post. When I first became aware of Will’s column on Monday, it seemed to me the perfect example of the general problem with treating op-ed pages as “opinion.” That is, if by opinion, you mean that someone doesn’t have to adhere to the facts. I could state that the Earth is 6000 years old, and no one would dare correct me, because it’s just my opinion.
Check out Phil Plait and me at Bloggingheads with our dueling headsets, talking about citizen science and Twittering fireballs. Which of us will complete your phone order first? The race is on.
Originally published February 21, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Behold the ribosome, one of life’s hideously tangled molecular masterpieces. You couldn’t live without it, and the same goes for all living things on Earth. It might seem impossible to reconstruct the evolution of such a complex thing that emerged over 3.5 billion years ago. But according to an intriguing new hypothesis, the ribosome’s evolution may turn out to be elegantly simple. You can read about it in my latest guest post on the Origins Blog.
Originally published February 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Meg, a graduate student in physiology and pharmacology, writes, “It’s a starburst lilly with DNA as a stem to symbolize that everything originates from genetics!”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published February 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.