I spoke Tuesday on Seattle, and there’s proof now! Alan Boyle, MSNBC’s science guru, wrote a great piece on both the talk and the subject, my book Microcosm. Meanwhile, folks from Real Science were taping, and now you can listen to the talk at their web site. If I had lots of free time, I’d combine the audio with my slides and post them, but I’m swamped for now.

I also completely spaced out last week and forgot to mention that I was interviewed on the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. You can listen here.

Continue reading “Microcosm on MSNBC, Podcasts” →

Don’t forget to check in for the latest posts going up over at the Scienceblog Book Club. My book Microcosm has gotten us into a debate about the nature of life. 

Originally published June 5, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

I’m back at last from the west coast leg of the Microcosm tour.

Portland had a cloudy, melancholy charm, and at Powell’s I gave a reading in front of a collection of hand-made black velvet paintings from the nearby Velveteria. When the audience’s eyes drifted off of me, I couldn’t tell if they were lost in thought or distracted by Jimi Hendrix or a smoking clown.

Continue reading “E. coli Evolution Follow-up” →

A caterpillar’s life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps that use caterpillars as hosts for their young. These parasitoid wasps are among my favorite creatures (see my post on the emerald cockroach wasp, which attacks cockroaches like a neurosurgeon). So it was with eye-popping delight that I read a new paper in PLOS Biology One about how another species of wasp in Brazil attacks another caterpillar. Glyptapanteles glyptapanteles is more than just cruel to its host. It also gives its host an extreme case of Stockholm syndrome.

Continue reading “Stockholm Syndrome For Moths” →

Just a technical note–for some reason my site carlzimmer.com has been put on some bad list by Google, so that you are warned that if you go to the site your computer will melt into a pool of liquid germanium. But it’s safe. 

Originally published June 3, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.