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.

My “Matter” column this week at the New York Times is a biography of the element chlorine. You may know it from roles in such classics as The Swimming Pool or Table Salt. But chlorine has had a long, weird history on Earth. Recent studies suggest that chlorine levels were ten times higher on our planet when it formed. If it still had that much chlorine today, we probably never would have existed. Check out my column for the full story.

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

Last week I wrote in my “Matter” column at the New York Times about how wolves became dogs. I described two new studies on the genetic transformation that produced our canine pets, starting about 32,000 years ago. The scientists who did the research discovered that certain genes in the dog genome have experienced strong natural selection.

Some of those evolving genes are especially intriguing, because they’re known to be important in the brain. One of these genes, for example, makes a protein that’s involved in controlling the level of a neurotransmitter called serotonin. Serotonin influences behaviors like aggression–not just in dogs, but in humans. And in humans, that same gene has experienced strong natural selection, too. For humans and dogs, alike, a key step in our recent evolution may have involved becoming more sociable.

Continue reading “Another Link Between Dog Brains And Our Brains” →