Steve Mirsky, host of the excellent Science Talk, a podcast at Scientific American, talked to me the other day about all sorts of things. Part one of our talk is now online. We talk about my recent story about evolution in New York City. (Scientific American has a special issue dedicated to cities this month.) Listen to the podcast here.
Steve will be posting the second part of the talk soon.
Originally published August 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
It’s been a while since we’ve treated to the spectacle of Ann Coulter lecturing about evolution, but she’s at it again. She’s just written an op-ed in the wake of Rick Perry’s recent statement that Texas teaches evolution and creationism [his word] because evolution is “just a theory out there.”
Coulter takes this opportunity to remind us that she dedicated a third of her 2006 book Godless to demolishing evolutionary biology. Apparently the scientists who have published over 59,000 papers on the topic of evolution since she published her book didn’t get the memo.
Continue reading “Ann Coulter Nostalgia: Behold, For *I* Am The Giant Flatulent Raccoon”
In 1833, John Obadiah Westwood, a British entomologist, tried to guess how many species of insects there are on Earth. He extrapolated from England to Earth as a whole. “If we say 400,000, we shall, perhaps, not be very wide of the truth,” he wrote. Today, scientists have found over a million species of insects and keep finding more every year.
The question of how many species there are on Earth has been a tricky one ever since Westwood’s day. I’ve written a story for the New York Times about a new estimate that was published today: 8.7 million.
Continue reading “How many species are there? My latest for the New York Times”
In the wake of last year’s earthquake in Haiti, cholera arrived on the island for the first time in 60 years.According to the World Health Organization, 419, 511 Haitians got sick with cholera as of July 31, of which 5,968 died. The infection rate is dropping right now, but the arrival of Hurricane Irene could change that.
As I wrote in December, scientists applied evolutionary biology to find clues to how cholera–or, more precisely, the bacteria Vibrio cholerae— came to Haiti. They compared the DNA in the strain in Haiti to ones that have been found in other parts of the world. From this analysis, they drew a tree, which I’ve reprinted below.
Continue reading “Zooming In On the Cholera Tree of Life (And Death)”
The New York Times, August 23, 2011
In the foothills of the Andes Mountains lives a bat the size of a raspberry. In Singapore, there’s a nematode worm that dwells only in the lungs of the changeable lizard.
The bat and the worm have something in common: They are both new to science. Each of them recently received its official scientific name: Myotis diminutus for the bat, Rhabdias singaporensis for the worm.
These are certainly not the last two species that scientists will ever discover. Each year, researchers report more than 15,000 new species, and their workload shows no sign of letting up. “Ask any taxonomist in a museum, and they’ll tell you they have hundreds of species waiting to be described,” says Camilo Mora, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii.
Continue reading “How Many Species? A Study Says 8.7 Million, but It’s Tricky”