If you or someone you know is a student at Yale, check out the class I’m teaching this fall. It’s called Writing about Science and the Environment (cross-listed as EVST 215 and ENGL 459). You can find out about it on the Yale Online Course Information site, where I’ve just posted the syllabus.
Originally published August 1, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Last September, harbor seal pups in Massachusetts and New Hampshire started to die in droves. In today’s New York Times, I write about what killed them: a new influenza strain that evolved from shorebirds to seals, possibly as recently as last summer. While controversy swirls around scientists experimentally nudging flu viruses across the evolutionary between birds and mammals, Nature has been doing some experiments of its own. Check it out.
PS–The paper is in press at mBio. I’ll post a direct link when there is one, which should be this morning. Update: Here’s the paper.
[Photo of harbor seals in Nantucket by U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Northeast Region]
Originally published July 31, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Environment Yale, July 31, 2012
“There’s some hopping going on here,” says Steve Brady.
Brady is mucking through a pond. His hair, black dusted with gray, swirls over his forehead. He wears hip-high wading boots, which keep him dry as he wobbles in the deep mud and negotiates downed logs. The pond he’s slogging through sits on the eastern edge of Westwoods, a forest preserve in Guilford, Conn. Piles of tumbled granite boulders and stands of maples rise over the water. Long-legged mosquitoes drift around Brady, looking for a patch of skin. Water striders flit along the pond’s surface to get out of his way. A frog croaks from time to time.
Continue reading “Humans Driving Evolution of the Spotted Salamander”
The New York Times, July 31, 2012
Four times in the past century, a new strain of flu has emerged that can spread quickly in humans. One of those strains, which emerged in 1918, killed an estimated 50 million people.
All human flu strains evolved from flu viruses that live in birds. To understand how these transitions happen, scientists have recently been tinkering with a strain of bird flu to see how many mutations it takes until its spreads from mammal to mammal.
When news of their efforts emerged last fall, a fierce debate broke out about the wisdom of publishing the experiments in full.
Continue reading “Flu That Leapt From Birds to Seals Is Studied for Human Threat”
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Published by Scientific American.
Guest reviewed by Jaime Green
July 30, 2012
Continue reading “The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze”