I will be on the public radio show The Takeaway at 7:20 am EST Tuesday to talk about fireflies. I’ll update this post with a link to the podcast when it’s online. [And here it is.]
Originally published June 30, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Category: Blog
Fireflies are the topic of my story on the cover of the New York Times science section tomorrow. It’s the result of a visit I paid last Friday evening to a meadow in Massachusetts, where I listened to Sara Lewis of Tufts University explain the sultry, complex tale of sex, deception, and death that was playing out in front of me.
I first got to know Lewis’s work last summer, when I decided I wanted to include fireflies in my next book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Lewis co-authored a fascinating review of firefly biology last year (free pdf from Lewis’s web site). I particularly liked this chart, which shows how different species have evolved different flash signals.
As a science writer, I often find it sobering to read scientific history. Science works slowly, even though we wish it would work in nanosecond breakthroughs.
In 1913, for example, a Russian scientist named Nikolai Anichkov ran an experiment in which he had egg yolks fed to rabbits. On this cholesterol-heavy diet the rabbits developed atherosclerosis. The more cholesterol the rabbits ate, the bigger the deposits on their blood vessels became. It was a tremendous discovery, considered by some one of the greatest in medical history.
Continue reading “Genomes In Newsweek: Futures Near and Far”
Over at the Origins blog on Science‘s web site, I take a look at what means to have sex–especially if you happen to be bacteria. Check it out.
Congratulations are in order to the writers who are now finalists for the Royal Society Science Book Prize: