Humans have spread across the planet, settling in deserts and marshes and deep forests. They’ve adapted to their new homes, not just culturally but genetically, as natural selection has favored certain genes over others. But nowhere has this adaptation been more intense than at high altitudes–in places like Tibet, the Andes, and the Ethiopian highlands. For my Matter column in the New York Times this week, I look at the latest research on mountain life, and at the lessons it can teach us about evolution in general.

Originally published May 30, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

I’ll be on HuffPost Live today at 1 pm ET to talk about the new virus that has emerged in the Middle East, known now as MERS-CoV (short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus).

This virus first came to light last summer. As I wrote here in March, the virus turned out to be a coronavirus, belonging to the same broad lineage of viruses that includes SARS. Like SARS, it appears to have hopped from bats and infects people’s lungs. So far, 44 people have been identified carrying the virus, and 24 have died. Continue reading “Today at 1 pm ET: Live Discussion About the New Virus MERS” →

Over the past year or so I’ve gotten to know some extraordinary people. They were born with a single mutation to a single gene that caused them to grow a second skeleton. Their condition, called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, affects only one person out of every two million. If you traveled across the entire the United States and gathered everyone with the condition, you could fit them all comfortably on a single Greyhound bus.

I was inspired to meet them on a visit to Philadelphia last summer. The Mutter Museum, housed at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, is a collection of medical specimens of the sort you will see nowhere else in the United States. You feel an alternation of fear and exaltation at all the ways that the human body can be transformed. In one corner of the museum was the skeleton of a man named Harry Eastlack, who asked that his body be donated to science so that his disorder might someday be understood.

Looking at his skeleton, I wondered how on Earth something like this could happen, and what on Earth it was like to experience something like this. The result is the longest feature I’ve written in some time, which appears in the June issue of the Atlantic. You can read it here.

Originally published May 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.