A year ago, some friends (including my three fellow Phenomena writers) and I put together a web site to review science ebooks. We dubbed it Download the Universe, and we’ve reviewed about 80 titles since then, on everything from avalanches to Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve just written an anniversary post, in which I reflect on what works and doesn’t work in this new medium, and the things that give us as reviewers hope, along with a touch with anger. Check it out.

Originally published February 26, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

In 1980, a man walked into the Royal Perth Hospital in Australia, complaining that he was tired. He had been tired at that point for two years. The man’s medical history offered no good clues–at 44, his only indulgence was a glass of white wine at dinner each night. His doctors pushed and poked until they discovered his liver was swollen. Yet he showed none of the symptoms you’d expect from cirrhosis or liver cancer. The cause of the man’s trouble only became clear when the doctors got the report on his stool. It contained eggs from an animal known as Schistosoma mansoni–otherwise known as the blood fluke.

Continue reading “The Parasite’s Fountain of Youth” →

A reader writes, “I’m James Bernot, a graduate student studying shark and tapeworm coevolution at the University of Connecticut. Here is a tattoo I have on my calf of a Northwestern Pacific tribal shark, complete with a tetraphyllidean tapeworm near the shark’s pelvic fin.”

It’s hard for me to resist a tattoo of a shark tapeworm.

You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here and in Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

Originally published February 24, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

The Star Trek fans among you are no doubt familiar with “The Menagerie,” a two-episode story from the first season in 1966. The crew of the Enterprise gets trapped on a planet occupied by aliens called Talosions who look like humans, except for their massive, vein-encircled brains.*

That story was produced the year I was born, and when I saw it about a decade later, it made a big impression on me. Could brains get that big? Would they wind up with that cantaloupe shape? Would they provide Talosians with super-intelligence?

Continue reading “On the Possible Shapes of the Brain” →