Last year I wrote about the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, which injects venom into cockroaches to turn them into zombie hosts for their parasitic offspring. (More posts on Ampulex here.) The scientists I wrote about have been trying to figure out what exactly the venom does to the nervous system of their victims, and they’ve discovered that it interferes with a neurotransmitter called octopamine. New Scientist has an update. And they also have a link to a YouTube video that offers more than you may want to see of this awesome parasitic manipulation. 

Originally published December 1, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.

A quick heads-up: I’ll be talking about the tree of life tomorrow morning on NPR’s Saturday Weekend Edition. The segment will be archived on their “Science Out of the Box” web page. We’ll be talking about everything from animals to mushrooms to the unclassifiable viruses that graft the tree of life into a web.

Update: 12/1 10 am: …or maybe not. As far as I could tell over the breakfast din, the piece didn’t run this morning. I’ll let you know when and if it does.

Update: 12/1 5:30 pm: The piece just ran. I don’t think I made any major gaffes, but fact-check away. Here’s where you can listen online.

Continue reading “Swinging Through The Tree of Life Tomorrow on NPR” →

The Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology has rolled out the “Stevens Seventy,” the seventy greatest science books since 1900. If you click all the way through to Z, my 2000 book Parasite Rex ends the list. Many thanks.

As the introduction to the list points out, these things are always arbitrary, so judge for yourself. Did they leave any classics off? Did they honor an unworthy title? 

Originally published November 29, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.

I just noticed that in the new issue of the New Yorker Michael Specter has written an article on the viruses in our genome. I wrote about this research in the New York Times a year ago. I haven’t had a chance to read the article through yet, but I was mortified to come across this line…

Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short.

Continue reading “The New Yorker Gets Infected” →

For my latest “Dissection” column in Wired, I take a look at the tree of life, and the way it changed dramatically thirty years ago this month. To get a sense of what the tree looks like today, I pointed readers to the wonderful interactive tree of life at the European Molecular Biology Lab. But I didn’t realize until after I finished the column that when you scroll over the branches of the tree, pictures pop up of species at their tips. Most of the pictures are of assorted chains, blobs, and other microbial portraits. But things get more interesting in the animal kingdom. Iz very nice!

Hat tip: Delightfully So

Continue reading “Borat sapiens” →