You go for a swim, and you don’t even notice the tiny worm that burrows into your skin. It slips into a vein and surges along through the blood for a while. Eventually it leaves your blood vessels and starts creeping up your spinal cord. Creep creep creep, it goes, until it reaches your head. It curls up on the surface of your brain, forming a hard cyst. But it is not alone–every time you’ve gone for swim, worms have slithered into you, and now there are thousands of cysts peppering your brain.
Author: Lori Jia
Lisa writes, “These are simple hydrocarbon chains (nonane, to be exact)– one on each wrist. They end on the bottom sides of my wrists. I am a synthetic organometallic chemistry PhD student at the University of Washington, and I got these linear hydrocarbon ‘bracelets’ as I transitioned into my undergrad chemistry program. When I get my PhD, I want to get a tattoo of the first crystal structure I published (of my first unique molecule synthesized)!”
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Originally published December 16, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Something strange recently happened to me in Tennessee. I wasn’t actually in Tennessee when it happened. The strangeness emanated from there–actually, from one spot in Tennessee–and eventually reached me here up in New England.
It started with a column I wrote in the October issue of Discover, about the evolution of the human face. Sometimes people write letters to the magazine about my pieces. My editors dropped a note to let me know that all at once they got 40 60 letters about my column. All from the outskirts of Memphis. All pretty much identical in style and substance.
Continue reading “The Evolution of the Face: A Letter to Some Readers in Tennessee”
Loren, a biology graduate student, writes, “It’s a sketch of the horseshoe crab Limulus, such as a zoologist would make (and with the abdominal segments correctly identified). Perhaps the most magnificent living fossil of all, the horseshoe crab is the survivor of a lineage that extends back some 445 million years into the Ordovician. The four extant species are the only living representatives of the ancient arthropod class Merostomata and the only known chelicerate crabs.”
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Originally published December 15, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.