I just got back from a pretty remarkable lecture by the husband-and-wife team of Peter and Rosemary Grant. The Grants started studying Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands in 1973, and they made some of the most detailed studies of evolution in the wild ever carried out. Their adventures were chronicled 14 years ago by Jonathan Weiner in the Beak of the Finch, which won the Pulitzer Prize. But the Grants did not stop. They continued to observe the birds evolve, and make fascinating new discoveries. In 2002, I wrote an article on what they’d learned after some three decades of research.
Author: Lori Jia
I’ll be talking today on “Word of Mouth” on New Hampshire Public Radio at noon EST. The topic will be my new article on the biology of intelligence in Scientific American. Listen here.
Update: The segment is archived here.
Originally published September 29, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
We’ve cast our votes…and here are the winners. As a judge, let me extend best wishes to the winners and all the entrants to the National Academies of Sciences Communication Award.
Originally published September 26, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Thadd writes: “I got this archaeology themed tattoo today, somewhat inspired by your science tattoos. It was inspired by a relief at Persepolis created under the Persian emperor Darius II. It depicts a winged sun disk, likely showing the god Ahura Mazda, in this case, but was used as an icon for important deities in Assyria, Egypt, Judah, Urartu, and throughout most of the ancient Near East.”
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published September 25, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
If you live in striking distance of Columbus Circle in Manhattan, come on over to Borders at 7 pm tomorrow. I’ll be speaking on a panel about The Best American Science Writing 2008, which is just out. I’ll talk about cancer as a nasty side effect of evolution, and Pulitzer-prize winner Amy Harmon will talk about what it’s like to face life with a lethal gene. This year’s editor, author Sylvia Nasar, and the series editor Jesse Cohen will be there too.
Originally published September 24, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.