Writing about the brain can sometimes bring me amazingly close to my readers–so close that I feel like I’m inside their minds. Case in point: my new column for Discover, on the subject of the mind’s eye.
Author: Matt Kristoffersen
In tomorrow’s New York Times I have an essay about the art of seeing Nature’s unseen–from the bestiaries of the Middle Ages to today’s images of feathered dinosaurs and upright apes. Check it out, and also check out the accompanying slide show about Conrad Gessner, a Renaissance naturalist who assembled the greatest zoological encyclopedia of his day–which included unicorns.
Originally published March 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
C-SPAN has opened up their archives, so that you can search and watch all 23 years of their footage. Their Booknotes crew came to a talk I gave at Stanford University Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh. And now you can watch it here.
Originally published March 18, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
How times have changed. Used to be, if I wanted to figure out what people were reading, I’d ask a few friends. This week, I got replies from 761 people.
On Monday I asked you to help me get a better sense of the science reader–how the science reader gets a science fix, what the science reader values, and what the science reader expects from the future. Thanks to everyone who responded–both directly to the survey questions and indirectly in the comments. Not surprisingly, commenters revealed to me some shortcomings of the survey itself–most glaringly, leaving podcasts, radio, and public libraries off the list of venues where you get your science fix. Despite these shortcomings, I still ended up thinking the survey was very useful. The picture it paints is pretty clear, and, in some ways, surprising.
Continue reading “The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile”
There was a time when seahorses meant little to me. They were pleasant to look at in an aquarium. They seemed to show up a lot on the walls of restaurants near beaches. But as is so often the case in nature, there’s bizarre biology lurking under the surface. Specifically, inside the male seahorses. When it’s time to make new seahorses, the male seahorses get pregnant.
Their pregnancy seems bizarre because it is rare. In most species that keep their young inside a parent, the job goes to the mother. But there is a deep symmetry to these two ways of reproducing. That’s a general rule when it comes to evolution: time and again, biologists find the same underlying principles driving the evolution of both the familiar and the bizarre.