Category: Blog
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be talking about Science Ink on Thursday at 7 pm at the Guilford Free Library in Guilford, CT. I’ll be in the lovely Historical Room on the second floor. Fortunately, I’ll have some historical engravings of tattooed Maori and such to match the ambiance.
Originally published March 6, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Download the Universe, a new science ebook review, is now entering its third week of life. We’ve been publishing a string of new reviews since I last blogged about it. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, now is a great time to do so. Here are the latest:
The ongoing controversy over experimental strains of bird flu is one of those multi-dimensional stories that you just can’t fit into one article. I’ve written about it at Slate and here at the Loom, and I can point elsewhere to no end of excellent stuff. Fellow Discover blogger Ed Yong has a sharp, concise round-up on the research over at Nature, for example, and Michael Specter has a new story on it in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required, alas).
In tomorrow’s New York Times, I take a look into one dimension of the story that has seemed under-explored to me. The controversy over the bird flu revolves around the risk that publishing the full details of the research could lead someone to recreate the virus and unleash a pandemic. Not just a terrorist or a hostile nation, but perhaps even a so-called “garage scientist” toiling at home. Is this a realistic risk, or unfounded fear? After talking to virologists who make viruses for a living and DIY biologists who don’t, I find that the answer is pretty complicated. Check it out.
Originally published March 5, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Alan Alda has come up with an excellent contest for scientists:
Answer the question, “What is a flame?”
Here’s the catch. The audience for the answer is 11-year-olds. Writing this week in Science (free pdf), Alda recalls how he asked this question to his science teacher when he was 11. The answer he got was, “It’s oxidation.”
Whenever I give a talk about my book Parasite Rex, I try to gather together the creepiest images of parasites that I can. Every time, there’s one kind of parasite that summons an instant reaction: a mix of laughter, sucked-in breaths, and gasps of recognition. I speak, of course, of the parasites that eat your tongue.
I only mean you if you’re a fish. Some species of isopods (crustaceans related to the less creepy crabs and lobsters) will swim into the gill of a fish, make their way to its mouth, and devour its tongue. It will jam its legs into the gills to hold itself in place, facing forward, its eyes gazing out of the fish’s mouth, taking the very place of the tongue it just ate.
Continue reading “Tongue Parasites to People of Earth: Thank You For Your Overfishing”
