This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
I’m Starved For You (Positron). By Margaret Atwood. Published by Byliner.
Reviewed By Veronique Greenwood
November 29, 2012
Continue reading “The Serial Ebook: Margaret Atwood’s Positron”
Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have a new episode of Radiolab airing this week. The theme of the show is heredity and its attendant mysteries. I had great fun telling the strange and tragic story of the early twentieth century biologist Paul Kammerer, who thought he could change the human race with the help of a midwife toad. (Some of my favorite sources about this tale and its present-day reverberations are here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
Science writer Sam Kean joins the Radiolab crew as well, along with some scientists doing fascinating work on mother rats licking baby rats, Swedes surviving harsh winters, and more.
Added bonus: my daughters Charlotte and Veronica helped read the program credits. They get their ability to pronounce “Jad Abumrad” from me.
I’ve embedded the show below–
Originally published November 20, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Each year I run a workshop for science graduate students at Yale, encouraging them to write clearly, compellingly, and effectively. I’m tempted next year to just cue up this video of Steven Pinker discussing his next book–a psychology-based guide to good writing–and kick back.
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Originally published November 16, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
TEDYouth is in its second year of putting together an afternoon of short talks for high school students. I’ll be joining in with a quick introduction to my favorite parasite. The event, which takes place in New York City, will be live-streamed–visit this page for more information for viewing. It will run from 1 pm to 6 pm ET. I’m scheduled to talk at 2:45.
Originally published November 16, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
In May I wrote in Discover about a major experiment in neuroscience. Ahmad Hariri, a neuroscientist at Duke, is gathering lots of data from hundreds of college students–everything from genetic markers to psychological profiles to fMRI scans. He hopes that the Duke Neurogenetics Study, as he’s dubbed it, will reveal some of the ways in which the variations in our genes influence our brain circuitry and, ultimately, our personality and behavior.
Hariri plans to collect data from over 1000 people, but he and his colleagues are already starting to analyze the hundreds of students they’ve already examined to look for emerging patterns. In the open-access journal Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders, they’ve just published some of their first results. While the results are, of course, preliminary, they do offer an interesting look at the future of neuroscience. Rather than pointing to some particular gene or brain region to explain some feature of human behavior, neuroscientists are learning how to find patterns that emerge from several factors working together.
Continue reading “Fear, Reward, and The Bottle: An Update to My Column on Neurogenetics”