Today, The Guardian relayed one of those stunning medical stories that causes me to clean off my glasses and take another look to make sure I’m reading it clearly. They report that an outbreak of norovirus in Britain this winter has struck more than 1.1 million people with vomiting and diarrhea.

That’s right: 1.1 million. In Britain alone.

Continue reading “The Norovirus: A Study in Puked Perfection” →

Anna writes, “I’m a geology student at UCSC and I got to thinking what tattoo would really encapsulate the major, regardless of what I do with it. Plate tectonics is the driving force behind all geologic processes; it’s crazy to me how young the science is. So I got a tattoo, a map of the world with plate boundaries and the direction of their motion, along with a 3D image of a cross section of a subduction zone.”

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

Originally published December 29, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

How, you may be asking yourself, is a good sense of direction like a bad case of acne?

Over many decades, psychologists have measured the minds of men and women, looking for similarities and differences. Reliable results are notoriously hard to come by, because it can be very easy to find differences where none really exist. If you decided in 1970 to look at the fraction of scientific and medical Ph.D. awarded to women–under 5 percent–you might conclude that women’s brains just weren’t suited to the task. Today, that figure has reached about 50 percent. Women’s brains haven’t evolved over the past 40 years. Their social environment has.

Continue reading “Of Men, Navigation, and Zits” →