I’m preparing for my first trip to New Orleans. The occasion is the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America. Steven Austad, a University of Texas biologist, asked me to come give a talk in a session he’s organized next Monday. Austad studies the evolution of aging in the hopes of finding ways of slowing the aging process. (I wrote about him in 2007 in the sadly defunct Best Life magazine–read the article here or here.) In the face of an anti-evolution education bill passed by the Louisiana legislature, Austad decided to use his trip to the state next week to organize a session on the important of a good evolution education.

Continue reading “Evolution and the citizen: Your thoughts?” →

A lovely piece from Robert Sapolsky, one of those scientists who gives us science-writers night terrors that we’ll be out of a job soon. It takes a while for Sapolsky to get to the gist, but it’s a gist worth waiting for: how we think in metaphor. So is poetry’s greatest strength the result of the social evolution of primates? Check it out.

Originally published November 15, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

This was fun. My editors at the Times asked me to take part in a special edition of Science Times coming out tomorrow, called “What’s Next.” My own charge was to pick ten scientists from across a wide range of disciplines and get their ideas about what we might expect to be reading about in 2011. It’s hardly an exhaustive list–I prefer to think of it as a tasting menu, full of pungent surprises, from stem-cell garage biology to the Indian Ocean’s global reach. The piece is set up as an interactive feature, including some additional audio comments from the scientists. Check it out, and check out the other articles in this special section, too.

Originally published November 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

On my latest podcast, I talk beer–that marvel of microbiology that people have been swilling for thousands of years. My guide to the brewing cosmos is Charles Bamforth, a professor of brewing science at the University of California, Davis.Check it out.

Originally published November 5, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.