On Thursday, an excellent crowd turned out, despite the sharp cold weather, to hear me talk about Neanderthals. I managed to get a fairly good recording on my Iphone, and today I melded it with my slides on Imovie, to create a slideshow of the talk. I’ve embedded the Youtube and the Vimeo versions below. Take your pick.

YouTube:

Vimeo:

Originally published December 18, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Just a reminder–TODAY at 5 pm, I will be giving a lecture at the Yale Medical School, as part of a series hosted by the Yale Medical Humanities and the Arts Council.

I’ll be talking about some of the eye-popping studies that have come out over the past couple years on the Neanderthals, our enigmatic extinct cousins (and grandparents, in some cases). It might seem an odd fit to talk about Neanderthals at a medical school, but when you consider the medically important genes that Neanderthals carried, suddenly it starts to make sense.

Continue reading “Reminder: The Red-Headed Neanderthal today at 5 pm”

The nightmare that is the cholera epidemic of Haiti (2,100 dead so far) has become a little less mysterious. Haiti has not seen cholera for over a cenutry, and so the emergence of cholera in recent weeks has puzzled scientists and led to riots directed at the U.N. for supposedly bringing Vibrio cholerae to the Caribbean nation. Others have pointed to a New World strain as a potential culprit. It triggered an outbreak in Peru in 1991, and has circulated in Central and South America ever since. Perhaps these bacteria washed up on Haiti’s shores.

Continue reading “The Cholera Tree of Life (and Death)”