This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
The Solar System. By Marcus Chown. Published by Touch Press, 2010.
Reviewed by Jennifer Ouellette
March 14, 2012
Continue reading “The Solar System: It’s Elementary, My Dear Sherlock”
One thing that’s fascinated me about the ongoing debate about the manipulated bird flu (check out my pieces for Slate, the Loom, and the Times for background) is that it comes down, in large part, to information. Should the scientists who turned bird flu into a mammal-to-mammal virus make the details of their experiments public?
The debate has also touched on the concern that the viruses themselves might escape their labs. And yet the physical viruses have remained mostly in the background. If the information alone manages to get out, that might be enough for virologists to recreate the viruses. In fact, at a recent meeting about the flu in DC, a lot of the discussion about the security of these virus strains centered on the hard drives where the data is now stored.
I’m delighted to be able to share the handsome cover of my next book. For the past couple years, I’ve joined forces with University of Montana biologist Douglas Emlen to write a textbook about evolution for biology majors. We built the book with some elements from my 2009 textbook for nonmajors, The Tangled Bank, along with much more math, additional concepts, detailed explorations of recent and classic studies on evolution, and study questions.
The book is slated to be published on August 15, 2012, in time for fall classes (here’s the book page on the publisher’s site). We’re still ripping through the final proofs, but as soon as the cover was officially approved, I had to share it. The insects are walking leaves, which are not only beautiful, but a marvelous example of evolution at work.
Originally published March 10, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.
The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2012
I talk to scientists for a living, and one of my most memorable conversations took place a couple of years ago with an engineer who put electrodes in bird brains. The electrodes were implanted into the song-generating region of the brain, and he could control them with a wireless remote. When he pressed a button, a bird singing in a cage across the lab would fall silent. Press again, and it would resume its song.
I could instantly see a future in which this technology brought happiness to millions of people. Imagine a girl blind from birth. You could implant a future version of these wireless electrodes in the back of her brain and then feed it images from a video camera.