Author: Matt Kristoffersen
A lot of people are interested in my Slate story yesterday on the arsenic aliens. It’s still the most-read story of the site at the moment, Slashdot and others have linked to it, and I’m doing some more radio and maybe other media (details to come).
Continue reading “Of arsenic and aliens: What the critics said”
Psychology Today, December 8, 2010
The future is not new. By the dawn of the 20th century science was moving so fast many people were sure humans were on the verge of tremendous change. The blogger Matt Novak collects entertainingly bad predictions at his website Paleo-Future. My favorite is a 1900 article by John Watkins that appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, offering readers a long list of predictions from leading thinkers of the day about what life would be like within the next 100 years.
“A man or woman unable to walk 10 miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling,” Watkins wrote. “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet.”
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing some posts over at Psychology Today in conjunction with the publication of Brain Cuttings. Here’smy first, on the hazards of trying to predict the future of the brain.
Originally published December 8, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Attention, Nutmeggers!
I hope you can come join me on Thursday, 12/16, when I’ll 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 “The Red-Headed Neanderthal: My lecture Thursday 12/16 at Yale Medical School”
Quick note: I’ll be on the public radio show Word of Mouth show just after noon eastern time tomorrow (Wednesday 12/8) to talk about NASA’s cookie full of arsenic. You can listen live here. [Update: the podcast is posted now.]
Originally published December 7, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.