Category: Blog
As I wrote on Monday, we’re boxing up books in preparation for some house renovations. You were kind enough to take 21 autographed paperback copies of At the Water’s Edge off our hands–in about three hours.
Well, we have even more books that we’d rather sell than pack.
Continue reading “We purge, you save! Get an autographed hardcover copy of Microcosm”
The World Science Festival is gearing up for its third year in New York, and I’m delighted to participate once more. This time I’ll be talking about a topic near and dear to my heart–telling stories about science. On Thursday June 2, they’ll have a full day of scientist-writers, television producers, and science writers.
Continue reading “The art of storytelling at the World Science Festival”
Our neurons exist in a staggering vast network, with 100 billion cells forming some 100 trillion connections. And it’s up to these ordinary cells to form that network on their own, snaking across the brain or even across the body, in order to find the right target. In my latest column for Discover, I look at new research that reveals some of the elegantly simple tricks our nervous system uses to wire itself. Check it out.
Originally published May 18, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Biomechanics is the science of flesh and bone–how birds fly, sharks swim, muscles twitch, and tendons spring. In January, I went to a fascinating session at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology where biomechanics experts talked about how they’ve been trying to turn their insights about biomechanics into commercial products. One of the most surprising examples came from Charles Pell, a North Carolina inventor, who explained how surgical tools could be much improved by taking biomechanics into account. I later paid Pell a visit at the offices of his company, Physcient, to find out more about their first creation: a rib spreader that promises to spread ribs without breaking them. The result was an article which appears in today’s New York Times. Check it out.
[Image: Gray’s Anatomy]
Originally published May 17, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The Zimmer clan is preparing for some renovations to the house, which means boxing up all my books. We’ve got a particularly tall stack of copies of my first book, At the Water’s Edge: Fish with Fingers, Whales With Legs, and How Life Came Ashore and Went Back to the Sea. We’d rather sell these books than pack them. And so, from today till Friday, I’ll be offering autographed copies at my Amazon store for the low, low price of $5. (Imagine me shouting all this, Crazy-Eddie style.)
If you’re not familiar with the book, you can check out its carlzimmer.com page or check out thisreview in Times Higher Education, in which the reviewer writes, “It is wicked, I know, but I have the habit of turning over the corners of pages whenever I chance upon something unexpectedly interesting, exciting or informative. Zimmer’s At the Water’s Edge quickly became the most dog-eared book on my shelves.”