Luzius writes:

“I’m a PhD student in Historical Linguistics in Zürich, and I’ve got a glottal stop tattoo on the pinkie of my left hand. It is one of the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet and it designates a specific consonant occuring in many languages of the world. To articulate a glottal stop, you need to stop the airflow by pressing your vocal cords together, build up pressure from the lungs, and then release the vocal cords with an audible burst. Many dialects of English have a glottal stop instead of /t/ in words like /cat/ or /butter/. It is common in German, too, where you can hear it in front in front of words starting with a vowel, like /Anna/ or /Eis/. 

Continue reading “It’s the ‘-‘ in ‘Uh-Oh’” →

A new map of some of the connections neurons make in the frontal cortex of a monkey’s brain. From PLOS Computational Biology. Bigger image here. 

Originally published April 4, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

My newest “Dissection” column is up at Wired.com. This time around, I take a look at how our brains relay signals. They turn out to do a terrible job. What’s impressive is how they clean up their own mess. Check it out.

[Image via Vesalius Gallery]

(update 4.4.08 9:30 am: link fixed) 

Originally published April 4, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

In yet another sign of the growing respectability of the online world for communicating science, this year the National Academies have set up a new “online/Internet” category for their annual communication prize. Here’s what they want:

Entries original to the Web which published in English online in 2007 will be considered. Entries should include up to six online articles, hypertextual documents, podcasts, commentaries, etc., or any combination thereof, that constitute a formal series or that may have appeared individually on a topic or common theme.

Continue reading “In Search of Online Excellence” →

These biologists are holding out on me.

I’ve been writing about biology for quite some time now, and sometimes I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of the scope of life. Neurosurgeon wasps–got it. Eels with alien jaws–check. And then I stumble across something new, or should I say, new to me.

This week’s revelation is androgenesis. Androgenesis is what happens when kids get all their genes from their father. Normally humans and other animals produce offspring by combining DNA from both mother and father, an arrangement that’s often the case in plants as well. 

Continue reading “All Dad” →