Seth Mnookin has written an important book chronicling one of the most tragic blasts of anti-science in memory: the fraud that was the autism-vaccine link. I asked Seth to come to Yale to talk about The Panic Virus, and he’ll be there on Thursday, February 17.
Here are the details:
February 17, 4 pm
Morse College Master’s Tea
Morse College Master’s House, 304 York Street, New Haven
Originally published February 10, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann have started a cool project called The Open Notebook, in which they talk to science writers about how they put together a particular story. For their latest dissection, they chose my New York Times story from last year on the microbes that swarm in our bodies. They talked to me about how I wrote that piece, and my approach to writing in general (short answer: chaos). They even included an audio excerpt from one of the interviews I did for the story. If you’re curious about the sausage around here gets made, check it out.
[Image: My microbiome Moleskine]
If you could jump like a flea, you’d be traveling 3,000 miles an hour within a thousandth of a second. You can’t do it, so how do they manage? That’s the 350-year-old question I consider in an article in The New York Times. Check it out.
Originally published February 10, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, February 10, 2011
One moment, the 10 fleas were happily sucking blood from hedgehogs being treated at Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Aylesbury, which, of course, is in England.
The next, they were being plucked from their comfortable home and transported to Cambridge, where they ended up in a glass box with a Styrofoam floor. From time to time, bright lights would flood the box, so that a high-speed camera could film them. And the fleas did what fleas do in times of crisis: they jumped.
Continue reading “Fleas’ ‘Feet’ Unleash That Spectacular Leap”
I take a look at the science of facial recognition, and the puzzling ways it fails, in my column in the January-February issue:
Imagine that an eccentric psychologist accosts you. In his hand is a piece of paper with 20 pictures of roses. One of the pictures shows a rose in the flower bed you just passed, he says, and he asks you to pick its picture out from his lineup. The challenge would seem absurd—but if you were to change the roses to faces, nearly everyone could meet it.
Originally published February 7, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.