Thanks to Booklist for a late Xmas present: they put A Planet of Viruses on their Editor’s Choice 2011 list!
The book is currently available in hardback and ebook; the paperback will come out in May.
Originally published January 4, 2012. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Greetings, Gothamites! If you’re free Tuesday, January 24, please join me for a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. I’ll be delivering an anthropological lecture about an intriguing sub-culture that expresses itself with body inscriptions. I speak, of course, of scientists with tattoos.
At my last talk, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the evening was enhanced with the presence of actual, flesh-and-blood scientists with tattoos, some of whom appear in the pages of Science Ink. If you are a member of this inky, geeky clan and are planning on coming to the New York talk, please let me know so that I can try to work you into the presentation.
Continue reading “January 24: Science Ink comes to the New York Academy of Sciences”
I’ve just written a profile of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the best-known scientific figure in America. Here’s how it opens:
Continue reading “The Cosmic Performance: My new profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson”
Playboy, January 2, 2012
On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon has appeared briefly and then slipped below the western horizon, leaving the sky to blinking airplanes rising from La Guardia fifty miles to the south, to satellites gliding in low orbit, to Jupiter and its herd of moons and to the great river of the Milky Way beyond.
In 2011, the Loom reached its eighth birthday. Thanks to everyone who’s paid a visit or become a loyal reader in that time. With the year coming to a close, I spent a little time this week perusing the Loom’s archive, reflecting on the things that obsessed me during 2011.
More than many years, this one reminded me just how huge science is. Even if you limited yourself to the most important stories of this past year, there was just too much to keep up with. (Here’s Discover’s top 100 picks.) As a science writer, my focus is biology, but that didn’t ease my year-long case of head-spinning. The anchors that kept me from spinning away completely were the very small and the very complicated.