I’m in San Francisco for the Bay Area Science Festival. On Friday at 10 am PST, I’ll be appearing on Forum, a morning show on KQED. Listen here live!
Originally published November 4, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
If you’re a regular reader of the Loom, you’re no doubt familiar with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. If you’re not, now is the perfect time to meet this sinister creature which may very well be residing in your brain. It seems like every year or two, it gets more remarkable, and today it’s taken another step into awesomeness.
Here’s a quick Toxoplasma primer. It’s a single-celled protozoan that reproduces inside the digestive tract of cats. The cats poop out egg-like Toxoplasma cells into kitty litter and dirt. Other animals take up the parasite, which makes its way into their tissues, especially the brain. There it forms cysts that can linger for years or decades. Only if that animal gets eaten by a cat can Toxoplasma complete its life cycle.
Today Science Ink is published! Amazon has already run out of copies to sell, but not to worry–the books are spitting out of printers as I blog this. Order your copy, and it will get to you soon. If you’re on the fence, check out this review from Nature (yes, that Nature, the venerable scientific journal): “Beautiful…packed with fascinating stories.” (It’s behind a paywall, alas…)
On Thursday, I’ll be heading off for the first of a bunch of events for the book. As part of the Bay Area Science Festival, I’ll be in San Francisco on Friday.
If you’ve got some free time, here are a couple talks for your listening pleasure.
Radiolab presents a story I told about a fateful trip to Sudan on their latest podcast. I’ve embedded it here:
Last week, I also talked about viruses on Skeptically Speaking, and they’ve posted our conversation here. (If you have trouble at that link, try here.) Among other things, we talk about the unimaginably huge number of viruses on Earth, and I offer my vote for the Worst Virus Ever. Fortunately, if you’re not a caterpillar, you don’t have anything to worry about.
Originally published October 31, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
For the third year in a row I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the Imagine Science Film Festival. Along with fellow judged neuroscientists David Eagelman and Darcy Kelley and documentary filmmaker Robb Moss, I watched a slew of short films that touched in one way or another on science. The awards were just announced, and so I thought I’d hunt around for some online sites where you can watch them, either as previews or in their entirety. Here’s what I found: Continue reading “Swans and stem cells: winners of this year’s Imagine Science Film Festival”