This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
The Island of Secrets. By Matthew Power. Published by The Atavist.
Guest reviewed by Oliver Hulland
June 15, 2012
Continue reading “A Journey to the Island of Tree Kangaroos”
Discover, June 15, 2012
I dig a knife into a cardboard box, slit it open, and lift a plastic bottle of bright red fluid from inside. I set it down on my kitchen table, next to my coffee and eggs. The drink, called NeuroSonic, is labeled with a cartoon silhouette of a head, with a red circle where its brain should be. A jagged line—presumably the trace of an EKG—crosses the circle. And down at the very bottom of the bottle, it reads, “Mental performance in every bottle.”
My office is full of similar boxes: Dream Water (“Dream Responsibly”), Brain Toniq (“The clean and intelligent think drink”), iChill (“helps you relax, reduce stress, sleep better”), and Nawgan (“What to Drink When You Want to Think”).
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.