Author: Matt Kristoffersen
Saturn’s moon Titan is speckled with lakes of liquid hydrocarbons that might just the sort of places you’d want to visit in order to look for weird forms of life.
A Spanish engineering firm has designed a probe that could explore the lakes of Titan: a paddleboat. All it needs now is a seat, and I’ll be ready to take a spin on it…
Originally published September 27, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
New England’s fisheries are in such bad shape that the Department of Commerce has now declared them a disaster. It’s not merely the sheer volume of fish we’re catching that explains the woeful state of these fish stocks. Even in places where governments have established strict limits on fishing, some fisheries have been unexpectedly slow to recover. That’s because fish don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of ecological networks. And when we hammer these networks, they can suddenly flip into a new state. Getting them back to their old state can be surprisingly hard.
In the new issue of Scientific American, I’ve written a feature on recent research into how ecological networks flip, along with attempts to detect warning signs of food webs on the brink (subscription required).
P.S. A needless snarky commenter objected to having to pay for the article. As I pointed out to him or her, if you want to read two lengthy scientific reviews on the subject for free, here is a pdf and here’s another one.
[Image: Lake Michigan food web/NOAA]
Originally published September 24, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
I don’t like starting the weekend in a state of infuriation, but here we are.
On Wednesday, French scientists had a press conference to announce the publication of a study that they claimed showed that genetically modified food causes massive levels of cancer in rats.
The paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. That being said, outside experts quickly pointed out how flimsy it was, especially in its experimental design and its statistics. Scicurious has a good roundup of the problems at Discover’s The Crux.
Continue reading “From Darwinius to GMOs: Journalists Should Not Let Themselves Be Played”
When the first fossils of Neanderthals came to light 155 years ago, they raised a tough question: did they come from a member of our own species, or a separate one?
For all the progress scientists have made in studying Neanderthals since then, the answer remains tough–in part because it’s not that easy to define a species.
NOVA asked me to write about this enduring question. You can read my answer here.
Originally published September 21, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
NOVA, September 20, 2012
In August 1856, in the German valley of Neander—Neanderthal in German—men cutting limestone for the Prussian construction industry stumbled upon some bones in a cave. Looking vaguely human, the bones—a piece of a skull, portions of limbs, and fragments of shoulder blades and ribs—eventually made their way to an anatomist in Bonn named Hermann Schaafhausen.
Schaafhausen pored over the fossils, observing their crests and knobs. He noticed that the bones had the overall shape you’d expect from a human skeleton. But some bones had strange features, too. The skullcap, for example, sported a heavy brow ridge, hanging over the eyes like a boney pair of goggles. It was, at once, human and not.