Last week I caught some of the talks at this year’s Dwight H. Terry Lecture at Yale. The lectures are in their hundredth year, and this time around the topic was “The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue?” The speakers include Ken MIller, talking about his experience at the Dover intelligent design trial, and Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin, the leading historian of the anti-evolution movement in the U.S. (I’ll be writing an introduction to the volume that comes out of the lectures.)

If you’re interested, you can watch videos of the lectures now, here. 

Continue reading “Science and Religion Streamed to Your Computer” →

Congratulations to the new crop of Macarthur genius grant winners, including Ken Catania, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University whose muse is the star-nosed mole. It turns out that a single strange animal can reveal a lot about how nervous systems develop and evolve. For more on Catania’s work, see my blog post from last year and my article on some of Catania’s recent work for the New York Times. 

Originally published September 19, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.

Over the weekend I wrote about the natural history of the Escherichia coli strain that has contaminated spinach. According to reports today, 109 people have been identified as sickened with Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one has died. In the comment thread of my post, the subject of antibiotics came up. It turns out that antibiotics are the last thing you want to take if you get sick with Escherichia coli O157:H7. It may turn a nasty–but temporary–case of bloody diarrhea into fatal organ failure.

More below the fold…

Continue reading “Why Tainted Spinach And Antibiotics Are a Bad Match” →

I’m gearing up for some autumn talks. First up: Notre Dame University University of Notre Dame. The title of the talk is, “The Darwin Beat: Reporting on Evolution in a Controversial Age.”

When: Thursday, September 21, 4 pm.

Where: Jordan Hall Auditorium, Rm. 101

More information here.

I’ll let you know about some more talks as they approach. 

Continue reading “Headed for Notre Dame” →

Don’t eat your spinach.

That’s the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there’s been a report of one death in Wisconsin.

Continue reading “The Story Behind The Killer Spinach” →