Category: Blog
If you don’t already subscribe to Science and the City, a podcast from the New York Academy of Science, do so. They pick a great mix of intriguing topics, from the origin of the solar system to the physics of kite-flying. I was delighted that they gave me a call for their latest podcast to talk about The Tangled Bank. Our conversation ranged from the evolution of eyes to the power of good science illustrations. Listen here.
Originally published September 4, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Charles Darwin was interested not just in how new things evolve, but also in how old things disappear. Often, they don’t disappear completely without a trace. We don’t have a visible tail like our primate ancestors did, but we still have a series of little bones tucked away at the bottom of the spine. While it may not function like a full-blown tail, it still anchors muscles around the pelvis. Blind cavefish may not have eyes of the sort found on their cousins in the outside world, but they still start to develop eyes as larva, before the cells start to die away.
Sometimes, though, the only place to look for vestiges of a lost trait is in a genome. Continue reading “Losing Teeth, But Keeping Genes”
Having written a book about E. coli has made me a keen aficionado of E. coli ties and E. coli plush toys. But a glass sculpture of E. coli? Now that’s classy.
This beautiful piece of sculpture is the work of the artist Luke Jerram. Check out his web site for his entire Glass Microbiology project. Swine flu never looked so good.
(Hat tip to Stan Carey)
Originally published September 3, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Quick shake of the head, rub of the eyes, and back to some science.
In today’s New York Times, please check out my article about the quest for fossilized color. Birds without color would be like Van Goghs without the paint, and yet for 150 year paleontologists have had to resign themselves to drab fossils of birds, offering little idea of what the birds actually looked like. That’s now changed. It turns out that the microscopic bags of pigment that give feathers color (not to mention squid ink color too) are incredibly tough. Scientists have found them in fossilized feathers, and they’ve pretty conclusively demonstrated that these things are not feather-feeding bacteria, despite a superficial similarity. What’s more, the scientists can now even use the pattern of the bags (a k a the melanosomes) to figure out some things about the color of a 47-million-year-old ex-parrot extinct bird. It had the kind of iridescence you might see on a grackle or a brown-headed cowbird.
Two years ago I was invited me to participate in a weird but cool experiment. The author Robert Wright had set up an online talk show of sorts called Bloggingheads. Two people with something interesting to say–economists, political scientists, human rights workers, seasoned journalists, and others–would pick a topic. They would talk on the phone while filming themselves and then upload the recordings. Others could then watch them hold forth.
I loved the inventiveness of the format. I loved how a conversation could be embedded in any other site. I loved the way people would just talk for an hour rather than squeeze their points down to meaningless sound bites. And so even though it was just a volunteer gig, I dove in. It was took a while for me to get used to the medium–staring into the glass eye of a camera and pretending it was a human head just doesn’t come naturally to me. And crackly cell phone connections didn’t help. But on the best of occasions it was fun. It let me expand what I used to do only on the printed page. I had interesting talks with all sorts of interesting people, such as Craig Venter, Neil Shubin, and my brother.
But now my experiment’s over. This post is an explanation of why, and how this turn of events has gotten me thinking about the future of science in new media.
Continue reading “Bloggingheads and the Old Challenges of New Tools”