Last week I let you know about my upcoming series of talks about life. Here’s an update with the details of the full schedule. All four events will take place at Caveat in Manhattan:

9/6 I’ll kick off the series with the fundamental question, “What is life?” First I’ll talk to a philosopher, Carlos Mariscal, about why this question is so hard to answer–perhaps because the question itself doesn’t make sense. Then I’ll speak with Sara Imari Walker, a physicist and astrobiologist, about how she answers the question as part of the search for extraterrestrial life.

11/1 How did life start? Geochemist H James Cleaves II and I will talk about the century-long struggle to answer that question. I’ll then talk with astrobiologist Caleb Scharf about where that struggle has left us today, and where it’s headed. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, August 25, 2017” →

Greetings! I’m back from my break and putting the finishing touches on my heredity book. This is the anxious stage when I have to try to artfully slip late-breaking news–such CRISPR-edited human embryos (shown above)–into the manuscript. Everyone who writes a book about science silently wishes that scientists would halt all their relevant research once the book goes to the printer. After the book has safely made it to the paperback edition stage, I think it would be okay for the research to start again…

Speaking of CRISPR, I talked this week to Michael Barbaro of “The Daily,” the New York Times podcast. In a week dominated by talk of nuclear war, I was grateful to get a chance to chat about biology. Here’s the episode. My portion starts around 7:00.

For my first post-break “Matter” column for the New York Times, I write about some beautiful new fossils that tell us something new about the history of mammals. In the Age of Dinosaurs, a number of them glided overhead. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, August 11, 2017” →