I take a look at the science of facial recognition, and the puzzling ways it fails, in my column in the January-February issue:

Imagine that an eccentric psychologist accosts you. In his hand is a piece of paper with 20 pictures of roses. One of the pictures shows a rose in the flower bed you just passed, he says, and he asks you to pick its picture out from his lineup. The challenge would seem absurd—but if you were to change the roses to faces, nearly everyone could meet it.

Read the rest here….

Originally published February 7, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Darwin turns 102 202 next weekend, and I’ll be celebrating by giving the Provost’s Lecture at Stony Brook University out on Long Island on Friday, February 11. It’s a fitting place to do so, seeing as it’s where so many evolutionary biologists are based–not to mention the fact that it was where the great George Williams worked until passing away last year. In my lecture I’ll be talking about the ways Williams transformed Darwin’s legacy in so many ways–by asking deceptively simple questions such as why we have sex and why we get sick.

Here are the details:

When: Friday, February 11, 7:30 pm

Where: Student Activities Center Auditorium, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY (pdf map of campus)

More informationhere.

Originally published February 3, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

Last Tuesday evening, my article on Nabokov and butterflies went live on the New York Times web site. My editor and I decided on that timing to coincide with the lifting of the embargo on a new paper providing genetic support to a hypothesis Nabokov had about butterfly evolution. But that left a few days before it would appear in print in tomorrow’s Science Times. So my editor provided me the opportunity to add to the piece in the intervening time.

Continue reading “Nabokov 2.0: Expanded story, plus reactions” →

The Washington Post asked me to review The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. Back in my green days as a science writer and editor, I kept up fairly well with things cosmological, but the seductions of biology have distracted me from the sky for some time now. So it was a pleasure to get back up to speed–and to discover just how weird things have gotten in the universe–with Panek’s book:

Continue reading “The 4% Universe: My Washington Post review” →

That was fast–I was just on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC to talk about smiles, and they’ve already posted the conversation on their site. You can listen to it there, or right here:

A few minutes in, we talk about a mashup of Obama smiling in White House photos that’s been floating around (see below). When I pointed it out toPaula Niedenthal, my main source for my Times article  she likened his smile to the way we say hello on the phone. It always sounds the same, but that sameness doesn’t say much of anything about our emotional state.

Originally published January 26, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.