A new book is out, called Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing, coauthored by cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers. They take a look at the surprising parallels between animal and human health. The Daily Beast asked me to review it, and you can read my piece here.

The facts that animals and humans share an evolutionary heritage, and that we can gain medical insights through a comparison between species, are not new. And Zoobiquity contains some misconceptions about how evolution works and how to analyze it. Nevertheless, I think the book well-worth reading. I learned a lot from it about things ranging from cancerous rhino horns to anorexic pigs.

Check out my review here. (You can also read a fairly long excerpt from the book in the New York Times here.)

Originally published June 17, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

I had the pleasure of kicking off the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections with a keynote lecture on the impact of the Internet on science writing and museums. One audience member asked if she could see the slides again to follow some of the links. So here they are, courtesy of SlideShare.

I was skimming through the new Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 from the National Science Foundation when I came across this very interesting table. Whenever I see reports about science literacy in the United States, the reports are very parochial, with no comparison to other counties. Here is a table of scores on similar tests given around the world. We Americans do relatively well on a lot of the questions (although that sometimes means we’re about as bad as most other countries). The one big exception is when Americans are asked about the origin of the universe and of our species.

[pdf]

Originally published June 11, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.