Just a reminder–TODAY at 5 pm, I will be giving a lecture at the Yale Medical School, as part of a series hosted by the Yale Medical Humanities and the Arts Council.

I’ll be talking about some of the eye-popping studies that have come out over the past couple years on the Neanderthals, our enigmatic extinct cousins (and grandparents, in some cases). It might seem an odd fit to talk about Neanderthals at a medical school, but when you consider the medically important genes that Neanderthals carried, suddenly it starts to make sense.

Continue reading “Reminder: The Red-Headed Neanderthal today at 5 pm” →

At the end of January, I’ll be running my fifth annual science writing workshop. It’s open to all science graduate students at Yale. Grad students from other universities are welcome to get in touch about participating.

You can find all the details on the updated workshop web page.

Originally published December 13, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

The nightmare that is the cholera epidemic of Haiti (2,100 dead so far) has become a little less mysterious. Haiti has not seen cholera for over a cenutry, and so the emergence of cholera in recent weeks has puzzled scientists and led to riots directed at the U.N. for supposedly bringing Vibrio cholerae to the Caribbean nation. Others have pointed to a New World strain as a potential culprit. It triggered an outbreak in Peru in 1991, and has circulated in Central and South America ever since. Perhaps these bacteria washed up on Haiti’s shores.

Continue reading “The Cholera Tree of Life (and Death)” →

With so much attention given to one problematic study this week, astrobiology is getting an awful lot of attention–and probably not the sort that astrobiologists would like. If you want to broaden your view of this intriguing area of research, get thee to Itunes! Lynn Rothschild teaches a class on astrobiology at Stanford, and the winter 2010 edition of the course is available FOR FREE on Itunes. (I just started watching a couple classes and then decided to download the whole thing.) Also, check out the snazzy class web site for more on the study of life in the universe.

Originally published December 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.