Evolution: Making Sense of Life, the textbook Doug Emlen and I have just published, is now evolving into a full-blown app for the iPad. Once you get the free app, you can download some of the book’s chapters. We’ve now got the first eight chapters in the iTunes store. Chapters 1 (the introduction) and Chapter 8 (natural selection in the wild) are available for free. Chapters 2-7 can be purchased individually for between $4.99 and $9.99. The full book will be available December 1st, 2012; all 18 chapters will be priced at $80.

Originally published October 31, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

In June, a writer named Jonah Lehrer got busted for recycling material on a blog at the New Yorker. Lehrer, who specialized in writing about the brain, had been writing a blog called The Frontal Cortex for six years at that point; having just been appointed a staff writer at the New Yorker, he moved it to their web site, where he promptly cut and pasted material from old posts, as well as from magazine and newspaper pieces.

At the time, I just thought he was squandering a marvelous opportunity. When I was asked to comment on the situation, I wrote that some of the things Lehrer had done were uncool, while some were fairly harmless. But Lehrer himself acknowledged that what he was done was stupid, lazy, and wrong. So I figured he’d gotten the sort of school detention that wakes you up and keeps you from getting expelled.

Continue reading “In praise of the big old mess” →

I recently gave a talk in San Francisco about the future of viruses, based in part on my book, A Planet of Viruses. I talk about how deadly new outbreaks may emerge, how we may harness viruses for technology and medicine, and just how many viruses there are out there (hint: 10000000000000000000000000000000).

Author Carl Zimmer: Our Viral Future from Singularity Institute on FORA.tv

Originally published October 27, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.