The American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced this year’s Kavli Awards for Science Journalism. I’m pleased to report that I won in the category of newspapers with a circulation of 100,000 or more.
The award was for three stories I wrote for The New York Times. They didn’t have much in common, which is how I like it:
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been dipping into a project called “Moby Dick Big Read.” Plymouth University in England is posting a reading of Moby Dick, one chapter a day. The readers are a mix of writers, artists, and actors, including Tilda Swinton. They are also posting the chapters on SoundCloud, which makes them very easy to embed. Here is one of my personal favorites, Chapter 32, “Cetology.”
When I was an English major in college, I read Moby Dick under the guidance of English professors and literary critics. They only paid attention to a fraction of the book–the fraction that followed Ishmael on his adventures with Captain Ahab. This was the part of the book that they could easily compare to other great novels, the part they could use for their vague critiques of imperialism, the part–in other words–that you could read without having to bother much with learning about the particulars of the world beyond people: about ships, about oceans, and, most of all, about whales. How many teachers, assigning Moby Dick to their students, have told them on the sly that they could skip over great slabs of the book? How many students have missed the fine passages of “Cetology”?
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Rockets and People: Volume 1. By Boris Chertok. Published by NASA.
Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood
November 9, 2012
Our skin is encased in a snug microbial suit, from our scalps to the tips of our toes. Bacteria begin to colonize our skin from the moment we are born, and they continue to coat us throughout life. They do us many favors. They moisturize our skin to keep it supple; they unleash anti-microbial toxins to ward off pathogens that might make us ill. Scientists know that our skin is home to many species, but they can’t yet say exactly how many–or why some species are found more often on the elbow than on the chin.
Two years ago at a conference in North Carolina, I ran into Rob Dunn, a biologist who was conducting a survey of this menagerie. He was interested in the life found in one particular spot on the human body: the belly button. At the conference, he was handing out Q-tips people could use to swab their navels, which he and his colleagues could then study to tally up the species dwelling there.
Continue reading “On the Occasion of My Belly Button Entering the Scientific Literature”
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.