Slate is running a “pandemics” series, and I’m offering up the view from deep time. Koalas are getting hammered by a viral epidemic right now, and we’d do well to understand their woes. Because over the past 60 million years, we’ve experienced much the same thing, and it’s helped make us who we are today. Check it out.
Originally published December 6, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Symbolia.
Reviewed by Carl Zimmer
December 6, 2012
Continue reading “Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism”
The New York Times, December 5, 2012
In the rain forests of Costa Rica lives Anelosimus octavius, a species of spider that sometimes displays a strange and ghoulish habit.
From time to time these spiders abandon their own webs and build radically different ones, a home not for the spider but for a parasitic wasp that has been living inside it. Then the spider dies — a zombie architect, its brain hijacked by its parasitic invader — and out of its body crawls the wasp’s larva, which has been growing inside it all this time.
As you may be aware, I have a thing for parasites. So it was with great pleasure that I read through the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, which is entirely dedicated to the ways in which parasites turn hosts into zombies. What’s particularly newsworthy is that scientists are finally getting down to the biochemistry that allows them to pull the marionette strings. I’ve written a piece for the New York Times on the state of “neuroparasitology,” which will appear in print in next Tuesday’s Science Times. But you can read it now online.
Originally published December 5, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
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”