You can catch me on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on Wednesday 1/26 at around 11:45 am, talking about the natural history of smiles.
Originally published January 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Why is ScienceOnline a meeting like no other? Because it’s the sort of meeting where a biologist named Rob Dunn can set up shop in the lobby to ask for samples of bellybutton shmutz that he can analyze for biological diversity. Not only is it a place where such a person will not be hustled out by security, but it’s a place where a whole bunch of people respond by grabbing Q-tips to do their part for science. And you can bet every last bit of your bellybutton lint that I was right up near the front of the line.
Ten days later, my sample is now thriving nicely on a Petri dish, awaiting a more detailed analysis of its DNA. And here are the rest of the samples from the meeting.
All I can say is, #974, what is going on in there?
Originally published January 25, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, January 25, 2011
Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.
He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and he collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
Continue reading “Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated”
I’ll be appearing on The Takeaway Tuesday morning to talk about smiles. I’ll be on at some point between 6:20 and 6:40 am, and you can catch my segment again in the 8 am hour (EST). Soon after, it will be archived here.
Originally published January 24, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
I’ve got two stories in the New York Times tomorrow, at two ends of life’s scales.
In the cover story, I write about smiles. Faces have long fascinated me (see this Discover column on Darwin and Botox), and so I was intrigued to come across this recent paper focusing on smiles in particular. I talked to David Corcoran about the story for the first twelve minutes of the latest Science Times podcast.