Author: Matt Kristoffersen
Here is a song by Christine Lavin inspired by my recent firefly story. It is available for two days on her web site (and will resurface this fall on her next CD).
I think this is the second or third time a musician has riffed on something I’ve written. Listen, for example, to this darker tune based on the wasp that’s also a brain surgeon.
Originally published July 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
I spent the past week riding swan boats, roller coasters, and horse-drawn carriages. Every time I come back from a vacation, there’s a lot of catching up to do, but I was struck this time around by just how absolutely hopeless it has become to go back and review all the information that piled up while I was gone. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to answer all the questions from editors who puzzled over my inscrutable articles while I was gone. I’ll probably be able to get back to everyone who have been helping arrange talks for the fall. But I probably won’t be able to wade through all the press releases that showed up, or the tables of contents from new issues of scientific journals. Facebook? Twitter? I’ll just have to pretend the past week never happened. The Internet never takes a vacation, I’m discovering.
Continue reading “A Lot Of Things Happen While You’re Riding A Swan Boat”
Marcus, a parasitologist in Brazil, writes:
I am sending the two scientific tattoos that I have:
1. It is an undescribed species of freshwater stingray from the Family Potamotrygonidae (Potamotrygon sp.n.) that has being described by Dr. Marcelo Rodrigues Carvalho from Universidade de São Paulo.
2. An ectoparasite from needlefish (Belonidae) that I am redescribing. The parasite, Nudaciraxine gracilis belongs to the Class Monogenoidea (Platyhelminthes). This parasite group is characterized by having anchors, clamps, and hooks at the end of the body (named as haptor) used to attached to the host gills.
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published July 17, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
In my book Microcosm (which has just come out in paperback), I took great pleasure in all the things that something as tiny as E. coli can do. It can survive in frozen soils and stomach acid. It can can build intricate tails which it can then spin hundreds of times a second in order to swim. It can navigate away from the bad and towards the good. It can protect itself from overheating by making just enough protective proteins it needs, with thermostat-like precision. It can survive starvation by folding its DNA into a crystalline sandwich and powering down for months, even years in some cases. It can build microbial cities out of goo, and even commit suicide to help its fellow E. coli survive.
Continue reading “Microcosm Week: How E. coli Sees The Future”
On today’s episode of Bloggingheads, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I talk about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future