The Washington Post asked me to review The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. Back in my green days as a science writer and editor, I kept up fairly well with things cosmological, but the seductions of biology have distracted me from the sky for some time now. So it was a pleasure to get back up to speed–and to discover just how weird things have gotten in the universe–with Panek’s book:

Continue reading “The 4% Universe: My Washington Post review” →

That was fast–I was just on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC to talk about smiles, and they’ve already posted the conversation on their site. You can listen to it there, or right here:

A few minutes in, we talk about a mashup of Obama smiling in White House photos that’s been floating around (see below). When I pointed it out toPaula Niedenthal, my main source for my Times article  she likened his smile to the way we say hello on the phone. It always sounds the same, but that sameness doesn’t say much of anything about our emotional state.

Originally published January 26, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Here’s a paraphrasing of an email I got this morning from Harvard biologist Naomi Pierce:

“I don’t know if you remember, but I mentioned a few years ago how Vladimir Nabokov, best known as a novelist, was also a self-taught expert on butterflies. In 1945 he had a wild idea about how his favorite group of butterflies evolved that no one took seriously. Well, for the past decade I and my colleagues have been scouring the Andes for butterflies and sequencing their DNA to test his hypothesis. And he turns out to have been right in all sorts of ways.

“Oh, and the paper will be published tonight.”

I got on the phone fast. And here’s my story on Nabokov’s last laugh in the New York Times.

[Update: here’s the new paper that vindicates Nabokov, and here’s his 1945 monograph [click on the pdf link for a free file!]. Check out his Nabokovian conclusion at p.44, plus his painstaking drawings of butterfly sex organs.]

Originally published January 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Why is ScienceOnline a meeting like no other? Because it’s the sort of meeting where a biologist named Rob Dunn can set up shop in the lobby to ask for samples of bellybutton shmutz that he can analyze for biological diversity. Not only is it a place where such a person will not be hustled out by security, but it’s a place where a whole bunch of people respond by grabbing Q-tips to do their part for science. And you can bet every last bit of your bellybutton lint that I was right up near the front of the line.

Ten days later, my sample is now thriving nicely on a Petri dish, awaiting a more detailed analysis of its DNA. And here are the rest of the samples from the meeting.

All I can say is, #974, what is going on in there?

Originally published January 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.