Pain is a paradox. It feels like the most real, objective experience we can have, and yet it can be weirdly malleable. It’s better to think of pain, like memory or vision, not as a simple reflection of the world, but as a strategy we’ve evolved to stay alive. Thinking this way can help make sense of the awful experience of chronic pain, when this urgent signal refers to nothing except a brain caught in its own feedback loops. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the latest understanding of pain, and some promising research that uses these insights to search for a new, more rational pain-killer. Check it out.

[Image: Boy With A Rooster by Adriano Cecioni, 1868. Photo from Kate Eliot/Flickr via Creative Commons License]

Originally published June 17, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about female sea monkeys having sex with male sea monkeys from the future, and the troubles that follow.

That time is now.

Continue reading “Sex with someone from the future can be hazardous to your health” →

The other day I got the July issue of American Scientist and was tickled to no end to see this portrait of mimiviruses on the cover. As I write in A Planet of Viruses, mimiviruses were literally hiding in plain sight for years. Scientists considered them to be bacteria because they were too big to be viruses (see the minuscule HIV and rhinovirus, the cause of colds, for scale). It turns out they are indeed viruses, and perhaps the most interesting viruses on Earth. They may even represent an ancient branch of the tree of life, reaching back several billion years.

Check out James Van Etten’s excellent review of the science of giant viruses in the magazine.

Originally published June 14, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.