From time to time, I get letters from people thinking seriously about becoming science writers. Some have no idea how to start; some have started but want to know how to get better. I usually respond with a hasty email, so that I can get back to figuring out for myself how to be a science writer. I thought it would be better for everyone—the people contacting me and myself—to sit down and write out a thorough response. (I’m also going to publish a final version of this on my web site, here.)

First a caveat: I am probably the wrong person to ask for this advice. I stumbled into this line of work without any proper planning in the early 1990s, when journalism was a very different industry. The answer to “How do I become a science writer?” is not equivalent to “How did you become a science writer?”

Continue reading “A Note To Beginning Science Writers” →

I’ve updated yesterday’s post on the “dark matter” of the genome with replies from a co-author of the paper I wrote about.

Originally published June 22, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

One of the great triumphs of twentieth-century biology was the discovery of how genes make proteins. Genes are encoded in DNA. To turn the sequence of a gene into a protein, a number of molecules gather around it. Reading its sequence, they produce a single-stranded version of it made of RNA, called a transcript. The transcript gets shipped to a cluster of other molecules, the ribosome, which picks out building blocks to construct a protein that corresponds to the gene. The protein floats off to do its job, whether that job is to catch light, digest food, or help generate a thought.

We have about 20,000 protein-coding genes. If you tally up the amount of DNA they constitute, you get less than 3 percent of the human genome. Which naturally raises the question of what’s in the other 97 percent.

Continue reading “Listening to the Genome: Music or Noise?” →

Millions of years ago, some bats gave up their old habits of hunting for insects and tried something new: drinking blood. These creatures evolved into today’s vampire bats, and it’s mind-boggling to explore all the ways that they evolved to make the most of their sanguine meal.

A lot of the adaptations are easy enough to see with the naked eye. Vampire bats have Dracula-style teeth, for example, which they use to puncture the tough hide of cows. When they open up a crater-shaped wound, they dip in their long tongue, which contains two straw-shaped ducts that take up the blood. Continue reading “Dracula’s Children” →