Author: Matt Kristoffersen
My latest Brain column is now online. I look at the science of time travel. We may not be able to transport ourselves physically into the future or the past as H.G. Wells imagined, but we can travel mentally. And it turns out that we use a lot of the same equipment to go in both directions. In fact, our ability to remember our past may have evolved because it helped us project ourselves into the future. Check it out.
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Originally published April 26, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
My new book A Planet of Viruses is officially published on May 1. But if you’d like to get a taste of the book, pay a visit to Audubon Magazine’s web site, where they’ve got an excerpt.
The book is a linked series of essays. For each essay, I picked a single virus, but I chose ones that allowed me to explore a big idea in the world of virology. In the Audubon excerpt, for example, the virus is West Nile. As viruses go, West Nile is not all that dangerous. But its story is fascinating. West Nile’s tale is the classic American immigrant saga, from its arrival in New York City to its eventual spread across the country. Check it out.
Originally published April 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The Wall Street Journal recently asked me to review a new book called First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth. Astrobiology is a tricky subject to write about these days. It’s intensely exciting, despite the fact that its main object of study–life on other planets–has yet to be discovered.
I’ve given some thought to how we journalists should cover such a paradoxical science. We shouldn’t dismiss it outright, because astrobiologists have discovered fascinating things about life here on Earth, even if they have yet to find aliens. Yet we shouldn’t feel obligated to pump up every claim about the possibility of life elsewhere. We should be content to paint a portrait of the scientific process–including the intense debates–in all its gorey detail.
Continue reading “Arsenic life and all that: My new book review for the Wall Street Journal”
Thanks to Joe DeCapo for his response to my offer of an autographed book plate for the new edition of Parasite Rex. And yes, his cat (named μ) does probably haz one.
Originally published April 22, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
For some time now I’ve been bewitched by the microbiome–those 100 trillion passengers that make our bodies their vessel (here’s a piece from the New York Times last year, and a long essay from last month). But I was especially intrigued by a paper that came out today in Nature. Scientists found they could sort people into just three distinct gut microbiomes, much like they can sort people into four blood types. Here’s mystory in the Times, which will appear in tomorrow’s edition.
Continue reading “Blood type, meet bug type: my new story for the New York Times”