Author: Matt Kristoffersen
Here’s a talk by Ian Couzin, a scientist who does fascinating studies on crowds and their wisdom. I wrote about Ian a couple years in the New York Times. It’s funny now to actually see him in the virtual flesh. And to hear him talk about how much he loves the Pixies.
Originally published January 11, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Time for some livestreaming! At the end of this week I’ll be heading to North Carolina to Scienceonline 2010, a confab about all things scientific on the Tubes. I’m going to be talking in a session on Saturday morning at 10:15 am called “Rebooting Science Journalism In the Age of the Web” along with fellow rebooters Ed Yong,John Timmer, and David Dobbs. You can watch live on UStream and Second Life. Later, our session (and all the others) will end up where everything ends up sooner or later: on YouTube. (More details here.)
Science grad students can still register for my science writing workshop. Course outline and registration here: http://bit.ly/6lh3B8 It will meet 1/25 and 2/1. The workshop will be at Yale, but non-Yale grad students are welcome to get in touch about attending, too.
Originally published January 10, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
In my latest podcast, I speak to Penny Chisholm, an MIT microbiologist who studies the marine microbes that make a lot of the oxygen on which we survive, and who sees the ocean as a giant sea of virus-shuffled genes for harvesting sunlight. Check it out.
Originally published January 8, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Last month I wrote an essay about the future of evolution for Science. I paid particularly close attention to what will happen to our own species, describing some recent research and ideas from scientists. Natural selection will not stop, nor will the emergence of new, neutral mutations.
But this week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our future evolution, he warns, is going to lead to a devastating decline in our health.
Continue reading “The Origin of the Future: Death by Mutation?”