Comfortable in the Cold: Life Below Freezing in an Antarctic Lake

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Nova Next, June 11, 2013

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A big part of Ricardo Cavicchioli’s job as a biologist is finding new species. And Cavicchioli, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has had particular good fortune at a place called Organic Lake, in the Vestfold Hills. “We discovered things we were never even looking for,” Cavicchioli says.

If you actually tagged along with Cavicchioli on one of his trips to Organic Lake, however, you might be deeply skeptical that this was a place where anything could live. The Vestfold Hills are not a rolling tropical landscape. They are located in East Antarctica. Organic Lake gets as cold as -13˚ C. The only reason its depths don’t turn to ice is thanks to its staggering concentration of salt.

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Today on NPR Talk of the Nation: Second Skeletons and Rare Diseases

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AT 3 pm ET today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, I’ll be talking about my article this month in the Atlantic about a rare disease that creates a second skeleton, as well as the quandary of people with rare diseases more broadly. I’ll be on with Jeannie Peeper, who has the condition I write about and who is one of the main subjects in my piece.

Update: Here’s the recording of the segment.

Originally published June 10, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

Brilliant Blunders: My Review for the New York Times

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Science is not a string of successes. It has its share of errors and misconduct, and acknowledging them does no disservice to the value of scientific research that stands the test of time. So it was a pleasure to review a new book, Brilliant Blunders, by Marco Livio, for the New York Times Book Review. No one is perfect, Livio shows us, even some of the greatest scientists of the modern age. Check it out.

Originally published June 8, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

The Genius of Getting It Wrong

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The New York Times, June 7, 2013

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In a letter to a fellow physicist in 1915, Albert Einstein described how a scientist gets things wrong:

“1. The devil leads him by the nose with a false hypothesis. (For this he deserves our pity.)

“2. His arguments are erroneous and sloppy. (For this he deserves a beating.)”

According to his own rules, Einstein should have been pitied and beaten alike. “Einstein himself certainly committed errors of both types,” the astrophysicist Mario Livio writes in his enlightening new book, “Brilliant Blunders.”

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The Sex Life of Birds, and Why It’s Important

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The New York Times, June 6, 2013

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For a strange sexual history, it’s hard to beat birds. In some lineages, bird penises have evolved to spectacular lengths. Ducks, for example, have corkscrew-shaped penises that can grow as long as their entire body. They use their baroque genitalia to deliver sperm to female reproductive tracts that are also corkscrew-shaped — but twisted in the opposite direction.

In other lineages of birds, however, the penis simply vanished. Of the 10,000 species of birds on Earth, 97 percent reproduce without using the organ. “That’s shocking, when you think about it,” says Martin Cohn, a biologist at the University of Florida.

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