For the past few years I’ve been a judge for the Imagine Science Film Festival. One of my favorites from last year is called The Centrifuge Brain Project; I was so delighted by it that I went hunting for it online to share here. For whatever reason, it didn’t show up until recently. You can now watch it on Vimeo, and I’ve embedded it below.

The Centrifuge Brain Project from Till Nowak on Vimeo.

I have complicated feelings about movies about science. I don’t like movies that come after you with a pedagogical cudgel. To me, the best movies are the ones that take the most liberties with science. I guess I like The Centrifuge Brain Project so much because it toys with science in such a deadpan way–so deadpan that some commenters at Vimeo asked if the crazy amusement park rides were real or not. And yet, in the end, it’s not a simplistic joke, but a short meditation on how we humans try to fight gravity–and nature in general–both in the lab and at amusement parks.

(Mark your calendars–the next Imagine Science Film Festival will be coming to New York this October.)

Originally published April 11, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

Let’s say you want to buy things with germs in them. There’s yogurt, of course, but there’s so much else.

You can buy pills for your gut, creams for your face, tablets for your breath. You can buy blueberry juice with germs, and pizza with germs. And a lot of these products make big promises about the benefits their germs will bring you. “Fungal Defense is specially formulated with ingredients that help maintain a balanced, healthy digestive environment,” for example. Natren Natasha’s Probiotic Face Cream “is enriched with DNA fragments of beneficial bacterial cells, which speed up the skins own natural renewal process.”

Continue reading “Bugs As Drugs” →

This post is an unexpected sequel to a post I published last month about how single-celled microbes can evolve into multicellular bodies.

Here’s a quick recap of that story. Life became multicellular at least a couple dozen times over the past few billion years. To explore the factors that drove life through these transitions, scientists at the University of Minnesota ran experiments with single-celled yeast. They gave the yeast time to settle in a flask and then drew out some fluid from the bottom. Repeating this many times created conditions in which the yeast quickly evolved  into snowflake-like clumps. Bigger clumps fell faster, providing a reproductive advantage over single-celled yeast, which drifted slowly to the bottom of the flask.

Continue reading “Another Path For Evolving Bodies” →

What would it take to bring back an extinct turtle, or a long-gone mammoth? Thanks to the folks at TED for posting the video of my talk about my story in the April issue of National Geographic, embedded below.

(TEDxDeExtinction will be posting the videos of the rest of the talks from the meeting over the course of the next few weeks.)

Originally published April 2, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

This morning Barack Obama invited a small army of neuroscientists to hear him announce a new initiative to better understand the brain. Reports about the plan have been trickling out ever since John Markoff broke the story in February. In anticipation of the announcement, All Things Considered on National Public Radio talked to me over the weekend about the current state of our understanding of the brain, and what it will take to understand it better. I spoke in pretty hazy terms since the government hadn’t officially laid anything down. Now we can take a closer look at what is going to happen, at least in the near future. [Update: here is the official web site from NIH]

Continue reading “A New Push To Explore the Brain” →