We all started out as a fertilized egg: a solitary cell about as wide as a shaft of hair. That primordial sphere produced the ten trillion cells that make up each of our bodies. We are not merely sacs of identical cells, of course. A couple hundred types of cells arise as we develop. We’re encased in skin, inside of which bone cells form a skeleton; inside the skull are neurons woven into a brain.
What made this alchemy possible? The answer, in part, is viruses.
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
June 14, 2012
Anna Lee Phillips, a senior editor at American Scientist, recently invited me to join her and book critic Phil Manning in a roundtable discussion about reviewing science books.
Continue reading “Reviewing Science Books: A Conversation in American Scientist Magazine”
I had the pleasure of kicking off the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections with a keynote lecture on the impact of the Internet on science writing and museums. One audience member asked if she could see the slides again to follow some of the links. So here they are, courtesy of SlideShare.
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Originally published June 13, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
Connecticut isn’t exactly the Amazon. But our spotted salamanders are pretty handsome. And, as an added bonus, they’re evolving in some interesting ways. Full details to come!
Originally published June 12, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
I was skimming through the new Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 from the National Science Foundation when I came across this very interesting table. Whenever I see reports about science literacy in the United States, the reports are very parochial, with no comparison to other counties. Here is a table of scores on similar tests given around the world. We Americans do relatively well on a lot of the questions (although that sometimes means we’re about as bad as most other countries). The one big exception is when Americans are asked about the origin of the universe and of our species.
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Originally published June 11, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.