Nobody in my past was hugely famous, at least that I know of. I vaguely recall that an ancestor of mine who shipped over on the Mayflower distinguished himself by falling out of the ship and having to get fished out of the water. He might be notable, I guess, but hardly famous. It is much more fun to think that I am a bloodline descendant of Charlemagne. And in 1999, Joseph Chang gave me permission to think that way.

Chang was not a genealogist who had decided to make me his personal project. Instead, he is a statistician at Yale who likes to think of genealogy as a mathematical problem. When you draw your genealogy, you make two lines from yourself back to each of your parents. Then you have to draw two lines for each of them, back to your four grandparents. And then eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. But not so on for very long. If you go back to the time of Charlemagne, forty generations or so, you should get to a generation of a trillion ancestors. That’s about two thousand times more people than existed on Earth when Charlemagne was alive.

Continue reading “Charlemagne’s DNA and Our Universal Royalty” →

Here’s a gruesome treat. NOVA just did a show on venom, and you can watch it online.

Ed Yong and I have written to unhealthy lengths about the evolution of venom, so if you prefer venom in text to venom in video–or if you just want some background–check these posts out.

Pythons are still a little venomous

On the Origin of Venom

Painkilling chemicals with no side effects found in black mamba venom

World’s 2nd deadliest poison, in an aquarium store near you

How a pit viper saved millions of lives: Snakes as drug factories

Venomous shrews and lizards evolved toxic proteins in the same way

Originally published May 7, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

Last year I wrote in National Geographic about the long, remarkable history of feathers. The folks at TED-Ed (the educational wing of TED) invited me to boil down that history to about three minutes–accompanied by a splendid animation by Armeilia Leung. Here’s what we came up with.

For more information, you can visit the video’s page at TED-Ed.

Originally published May 3, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

A few years back, a team of scientists combed through the records for a million births in New York City. They noted women who had developed gestational diabetes during their pregnancy, and they also noted the women’s ethnic backgrounds. Women of European descent, the scientists found, had the lowest risk for gestational diabetes, with only 3.6% of them developing the disorder. African Americans had a somewhat higher risk of 4.3%. South Asian women, by contrast, face a far higher risk of 14.3%, with Bangladeshis running the highest risk of all: one out of every five Bangladeshi mothers in New York developed gestational diabetes.

Another risk that pregnant women run is giving birth to babies with deformed spinal columns. The pattern of these so called neural-tube defects is quite different from that of gestational diabetes. Dark-skinned women–in Africa, as well as Asia and Australia–are at low risk, while European women are the ones more likely to encounter this trouble.

Continue reading “What To Expect When You’re Expecting, By Charles Darwin” →