Author: Matt Kristoffersen
I’ll be on MSNBC at 3:30 pm EST on Tuesday (1/10 11) to talk about the future of our brains, based on this excerpt from Brain Cuttings. I’ll post the web archive once/if they put it online.
Originally published January 10, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
It’s always a pleasure to take a short stroll to my local library to talk science. That’s what I’ll be doing this Wednesday (1/12) at 7 pm, at the Guilford Free Library here in Guilford, CT. The talk is called, “Step Inside Your Brain.” I’ll be discussing some of the cooler nooks and crannies of our skulls, drawing partly on my new ebook, Brain Cuttings.
The talk is free, but you’re encouraged to reserve a spot. If the weather doesn’t play nice, the library will reschedule the talk for some time soon. For more details, check out the library web site. Here’s a pdf flyer for the talk.
Originally published January 10, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
To make soap, you must mix grease or fat with lye or some other alkaline substance. Sometimes, however, the stuff makes itself. If, for example, water laced with alkaline soil seeps into a coffin, it can transform a human body into soap. (This cadaver soap is known as grave wax or adipocere.) Here’s a picture of a “soapman” in the collection of National Museum of Natural History in Washington, just posted in the Smithsonian’s “Snapshot Series.” It belongs to a man who was buried in Philadelphia around 1800. His body was discovered in 1875 during an excavation to build a train depot. This particular example of grave wax is kept under lock and key in the museum’s “Dry Environment room,” so this is the closest you’ll get to seeing it. But if you want to see grave wax in person, be sure to get to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which keeps its eerie “Soap Lady” under glass.
Originally published January 4, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Hurrah! Choice, the leading magazine for academic book reviews, has namedThe Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution one of the outstanding academic titles of 2010. Here’s a line from the announcement: “These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as important–often the first–treatment of their subject.”
Originally published January 3, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Scientific American, January 1, 2011
A single neuron sits in a petri dish, crackling in lonely contentment. From time to time, it spontaneously unleashes a wave of electric current that travels down its length. If you deliver pulses of electricity to one end of the cell, the neuron may respond with extra spikes of voltage. Bathe the neuron in various neurotransmitters, and you can alter the strength and timing of its electrical waves. On its own, in its dish, the neuron can’t do much. But join together 302 neurons, and they become a nervous system that can keep the worm Caenorhabditis elegans alive—sensing the animal’s surroundings, making decisions and issuing commands to the worm’s body. Join together 100 billion neurons—with 100 trillion connections—and you have yourself a human brain, capable of much, much more.