Author: Matt Kristoffersen
At the end of January, I’ll be running my fifth annual science writing workshop. It’s open to all science graduate students at Yale. Grad students from other universities are welcome to get in touch about participating.
You can find all the details on the updated workshop web page.
Originally published December 13, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
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.
With so much attention given to one problematic study this week, astrobiology is getting an awful lot of attention–and probably not the sort that astrobiologists would like. If you want to broaden your view of this intriguing area of research, get thee to Itunes! Lynn Rothschild teaches a class on astrobiology at Stanford, and the winter 2010 edition of the course is available FOR FREE on Itunes. (I just started watching a couple classes and then decided to download the whole thing.) Also, check out the snazzy class web site for more on the study of life in the universe.
Originally published December 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
I just appeared this morning on the Madeleine Brand Show on KPCC in California to talk about arsenic life. Check it out.
Originally published December 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Ed Yong has written a great post on a new paper on how blue whales snarf up half a million calories in every gulp. The paper is the latest in a series put out by Jeremy Goldbogen of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and his colleagues. If you want to dig back into the earlier research, check out my 2007 New York Times article and this Loom post on how a physicist who studies parachutes helped solve the mystery of big gulps.
Originally published December 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.