Category: Blog
Saturn’s moon Titan is speckled with lakes of liquid hydrocarbons that might just the sort of places you’d want to visit in order to look for weird forms of life.
A Spanish engineering firm has designed a probe that could explore the lakes of Titan: a paddleboat. All it needs now is a seat, and I’ll be ready to take a spin on it…
Originally published September 27, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
New England’s fisheries are in such bad shape that the Department of Commerce has now declared them a disaster. It’s not merely the sheer volume of fish we’re catching that explains the woeful state of these fish stocks. Even in places where governments have established strict limits on fishing, some fisheries have been unexpectedly slow to recover. That’s because fish don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of ecological networks. And when we hammer these networks, they can suddenly flip into a new state. Getting them back to their old state can be surprisingly hard.
In the new issue of Scientific American, I’ve written a feature on recent research into how ecological networks flip, along with attempts to detect warning signs of food webs on the brink (subscription required).
P.S. A needless snarky commenter objected to having to pay for the article. As I pointed out to him or her, if you want to read two lengthy scientific reviews on the subject for free, here is a pdf and here’s another one.
[Image: Lake Michigan food web/NOAA]
Originally published September 24, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
I don’t like starting the weekend in a state of infuriation, but here we are.
On Wednesday, French scientists had a press conference to announce the publication of a study that they claimed showed that genetically modified food causes massive levels of cancer in rats.
The paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. That being said, outside experts quickly pointed out how flimsy it was, especially in its experimental design and its statistics. Scicurious has a good roundup of the problems at Discover’s The Crux.
Continue reading “From Darwinius to GMOs: Journalists Should Not Let Themselves Be Played”
When the first fossils of Neanderthals came to light 155 years ago, they raised a tough question: did they come from a member of our own species, or a separate one?
For all the progress scientists have made in studying Neanderthals since then, the answer remains tough–in part because it’s not that easy to define a species.
NOVA asked me to write about this enduring question. You can read my answer here.
Originally published September 21, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
In 1988, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist now at Michigan State University, launched the longest running experiment on natural selection. It started with a single microbe–E. coli–which Lenski used to seed twelve genetically identical lines of bacteria. He placed each line in a separate flask, which he provisioned with a scant supply of glucose. The bacteria ate up the sugar in a few hours. The next day, he took a droplet of microbial broth from each flask and let it tumble into a new one, complete with a fresh supply of food. The bacteria boomed again, then starved again, and then were transferred again to a new home. Lenski and his colleagues have repeated this procedure every day for the past 24 years, rearing over 55,000 generations of bacteria.
Continue reading “The Birth of the New, The Rewiring of the Old”