Over at the science-fiction/science web site io9, you can find an excerpt fromA Planet of Viruses. There’s a lot about viruses that seems tailor-made for science fiction fans, but I have to say the folks at io9 zeroed in on the sci-fi-est of them all: a virus that can make rabbits grow horns, turn people into trees, and make human cells outlive their owners. Check it out!
Originally published April 27, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
My latest Brain column is now online. I look at the science of time travel. We may not be able to transport ourselves physically into the future or the past as H.G. Wells imagined, but we can travel mentally. And it turns out that we use a lot of the same equipment to go in both directions. In fact, our ability to remember our past may have evolved because it helped us project ourselves into the future. Check it out.
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Originally published April 26, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
My new book A Planet of Viruses is officially published on May 1. But if you’d like to get a taste of the book, pay a visit to Audubon Magazine’s web site, where they’ve got an excerpt.
The book is a linked series of essays. For each essay, I picked a single virus, but I chose ones that allowed me to explore a big idea in the world of virology. In the Audubon excerpt, for example, the virus is West Nile. As viruses go, West Nile is not all that dangerous. But its story is fascinating. West Nile’s tale is the classic American immigrant saga, from its arrival in New York City to its eventual spread across the country. Check it out.
Originally published April 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Discover, April 24, 2011
One day not long ago a 27-year-old woman was brought to the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, sleepy and confused. Fani Andelman, a neuropsychologist at the center, and colleagues gave the woman a battery of psychological tests to judge her state of mind. At first the woman seemed fine. She could see and speak clearly. She could understand the meaning of words and recall the faces of famous people. She could even solve logic puzzles, including a complex test that required her to plan several steps ahead. But her memory had holes. She could still remember recent events outside her own life, and she could tell Andelman details of her life up to 2004. Beyond that point, however, her autobiography was in tatters.
Continue reading “Memories Are Crucial for Looking Into the Future”
The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2011
The bottom of a mine shaft doesn’t seem like the sort of place a naturalist should go to look for life. But scientists have found thriving communities of microbes living as deep as two miles underground. These organisms can’t rely on sunlight for their energy, so they survive instead on the radioactivity of the rocks in which they dwell. They exist in a world separate from our own, an ecological Hades.
As Marc Kaufman explains in “First Contact,” these microbes are important for two reasons: They show the extremes to which life on Earth can go, and they can help us imagine what life might look like on other worlds.