Just spoke today on New Hampshire Public Radio about my latest Discover column on the battle between the parents. Listen here.
Originally published November 13, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Category: Blog
…you can steer away from this biology-based blog and towards the newest addition to the Discover blog stable: Cosmic Variance. I’m a long-time fan of this cabal of highly literate physicists, and I welcome them here.
Originally published November 13, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Nature lies.
Organisms send signals to each other, and often those signals are honest–in other words, when another organism receives the signal, it can reliably use it to figure something out about the sender. Male fiddler crabs, like the one shown here, send a big, loud signal with their oversized claw. Often, that signal essentially says, “Do not mess with me.” And in many cases, that’s good advice.
Sometimes, though, it’s a major bluff.
Continue reading “You Want A Piece of This? (Please Please Please Don’t Take a Piece of This!)”
As I wrote in my story in the New York Times today, much of your DNA is shut down by molecules collectively known as epigenetic marks. Roughly 100 sites are notable exceptions to this rule: your mother’s copy of these stretches of DNA are silenced, while your father’s are free to make proteins and RNA–or vice versa. This imbalance, known as imprinting, is utterly fascinating, and when the imprinting system goes awry–when dad’s genes start becoming active when they shouldn’t, or when mom’s genes go quiet when they should be active–the effects can be catastrophic.
Continue reading “They Imprint Your Genes, Your Mum and Dad”
Things move fast these days for us science writers.
I’m writing this just after returning home from a radio studio in New Haven, where I was interviewed on NPR’s The Takeaway about my article in today’s New York Times on the gene’s identity crisis. (Speaking of fast, the segment is already archived for your listening pleasure here.)
And now I sit down to find that my next order of business is to respond to a pretty harsh judgment of the article that appeared overnight, from a scientist I respect.
Time for the fourth cup of coffee of the morning!