If you’ve got some free time, here are a couple talks for your listening pleasure.

Radiolab presents a story I told about a fateful trip to Sudan on their latest podcast. I’ve embedded it here:

//

Last week, I also talked about viruses on Skeptically Speaking, and they’ve posted our conversation here. (If you have trouble at that link, try here.) Among other things, we talk about the unimaginably huge number of viruses on Earth, and I offer my vote for the Worst Virus Ever. Fortunately, if you’re not a caterpillar, you don’t have anything to worry about.

Originally published October 31, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

For the third year in a row I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Imagine Science Film Festival. Along with fellow judged neuroscientists David Eagelman and Darcy Kelley and documentary filmmaker Robb Moss, I watched a slew of short films that touched in one way or another on science. The awards were just announced, and so I thought I’d hunt around for some online sites where you can watch them, either as previews or in their entirety. Here’s what I found: Continue reading “Swans and stem cells: winners of this year’s Imagine Science Film Festival” →

Earlier this year in National Geographic, I wrote about how feathers evolved long before flight. This timing naturally raises the question, how did feathered dinosaurs take to the air? My article was accompanied by a picture from the University of Montana lab of Ken Dial, who argues that before dinosaurs flew, they flapped their wings to help them travel up and down inclines. While not all experts accept Dial’s hypothesis, it has the undeniable strength that he can gather evidence for it in living birds, rather than just inferring behavior from fossils alone.

Continue reading “Dinosaurs in flight: the movie” →

We’re getting close to the publication of Science Ink (official date, November 1), and some very fun things are approaching. The wonderful National Public Radio show Studio 360, hosted by Kurt Anderson, decided to talk to some of the scientists featured in the book–about their science, about their tattoos, and about the nature of openness. It will be on their next episode, which starts airing around the country this weekend. (Here’s the segment page on their web site.)

And you can listen to it right here–

More announcements to come!

Originally published October 21, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Ten years ago this month, a team of University of Oxford scientists published a description of a family who struggled with words. By comparing their DNA, the scientists zeroed in for the first time on a gene associated with language, dubbed FOXP2. In my newest column in Discover, I look back at what scientists have learned over the past decade about how FOXP2 works, and what it tells us–or leaves us wondering–about how language evolved. Check it out.

Originally published October 17, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.