Many blog and Twitter readers may be acquainted with Jonathan Eisen, a biologist at UC Davis. In my latest Meet the Scientist podcast, I spend an hour chatting with Eisen about what you can learn by looking at the genomes of particularly weird microbes–from radiation-resistant critters to bugs that live in the guts of insects or on the bellies of deep-sea worms. Check it out.

Originally published November 5, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

Time to print up some new business cards.

Originally published October 30, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

I smell an anthology here: a collection of the all-time greatest take-downs, in which scientists expose lazy thinking. How about, The Best Pwnage of 2009?

My own latest nomination:

In the new book Superfreakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner make lots of provocative claims about global warming. For example, they say that solar panels would absorb so much heat they’d be useless for bringing the planet’s temperature down by cutting down carbon emissions.

Raymond Pierrehumbert, who, like Levitt, is a professor at the University of Chicago, shows why that’s wrong–not with calculus or some other fancy-schmancy mathematics, but with some embarrassingly simple arithmetic.

Be sure to check out the map at the end. Ouch.

Originally published October 30, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

Who says there aren’t any disagreements over human origins? Not this guy.

[hat tip the Twitterati]

Originally published October 29, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Scientific Merit Award at the Imagine Science Film Festival, which just closed over the weekend. You may have seen the winner we picked, Magnetic Movie, which I’ve embedded below. There was a huge variety to choose from, some wonderfully beautiful, and some finding great emotional depth in just a few minutes. But Magnetic Movie, in the way it reveals the hidden weirdness that surrounds us, was tops.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Originally published October 28, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.