Thanks to all the Loominaries who have taken extra copies of my books off my hands–or, to be more specific, off my shelves. On Friday, I offered autographed copies of the US hardback edition of Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea, and you cleaned me out in a few hours. Here is a picture of what I’ve got to offer today: two other editions of Evolution. If you’d like one of these books autographed and shipped to you, go to my Amazon store and order a copy.
In the continuing quest to avoid packing boxes before our house gets ripped open for renovations this summer, allow me to offer you–for one week only!–another sale. I’ve got 33 autographed copies of the first US hardback edition of Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea, which are available for $20. (The cover price is $40, and this particular edition has been out of print for some time now.)
I just got back from San Francisco, where I had the privilege to speak at the remarkable Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, the head of the foundation, invites people to talk to the group about topics that stretch our conception of time over long scales. So I spoke about viruses and time–how they exist at scales ranging from minutes to eons. The Long Now folks have just posted the audio, which I’ve embedded below. I’ve also embedded the slides for my talk, too.
If I can win the battle against an army of deadlines this week, I’ll try to write out the entire talk as I did with “The Human Lake.” But I’ve learned not to make hard promises.
Audio:
Slides:
Viral Time: Carl Zimmer’s talk at the Long Now Foundation
View more presentations from cwzimmer
Originally published June 9, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Last week I was thrilled to moderate a World Science Festival panel about the mysteries of sleep and dreams. The video is now up here. I’m also embedding it below (if WordPress plays nice with the code…). Be sure to watch till the end, when you can learn about snore-gasms.
I’ve actually written about Niels Rattenborg, one of the panelists before, in a piece for the New York Times. I also wrote about the researchers he’s now collaborating with, who put transmitters on birds that go on ultra-long migrations.
Watch live streaming video from worldsciencefestival at livestream.com
Originally published June 8, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
On Friday, as the E. coli outbreak gained horrific speed in Germany, Newsweek asked me to write about how this epidemic came to be. Scientists still have a lot to figure out about it, but some things are clear–in particular, that the bacteria have great scope for evolution into new deadly strains, thanks in part to the shuttling of viruses between them. (In my book Microcosm, I explain how this is true not just for E. coli, but for much of life.) My piece appears in the new issue of Newsweek, which you can read online here. (One late-breaking piece of news that didn’t make it in, by the way, is the finding yesterday that the new outbreak appears to have come from bean sprouts.)
While I was working on my Newsweek piece, a reporter for the BBC called me up for an article on the good side of E. coli. I explained how much of how we understand about life itself came out of research on this typically harmless bug, and that the biotechnology industry was build upon its biology. That piece came out over the weekend.Check it out.
[Image: glass microbe by Luke Jerram]
Originally published June 6, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.