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.
Darwin turns 102 202 next weekend, and I’ll be celebrating by giving the Provost’s Lecture at Stony Brook University out on Long Island on Friday, February 11. It’s a fitting place to do so, seeing as it’s where so many evolutionary biologists are based–not to mention the fact that it was where the great George Williams worked until passing away last year. In my lecture I’ll be talking about the ways Williams transformed Darwin’s legacy in so many ways–by asking deceptively simple questions such as why we have sex and why we get sick.
Here are the details:
When: Friday, February 11, 7:30 pm
Where: Student Activities Center Auditorium, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY (pdf map of campus)
More informationhere.
Originally published February 3, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Last Tuesday evening, my article on Nabokov and butterflies went live on the New York Times web site. My editor and I decided on that timing to coincide with the lifting of the embargo on a new paper providing genetic support to a hypothesis Nabokov had about butterfly evolution. But that left a few days before it would appear in print in tomorrow’s Science Times. So my editor provided me the opportunity to add to the piece in the intervening time.
Continue reading “Nabokov 2.0: Expanded story, plus reactions”