I just appeared this morning on the Madeleine Brand Show on KPCC in California to talk about arsenic life. Check it out.
Originally published December 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Ed Yong has written a great post on a new paper on how blue whales snarf up half a million calories in every gulp. The paper is the latest in a series put out by Jeremy Goldbogen of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and his colleagues. If you want to dig back into the earlier research, check out my 2007 New York Times article and this Loom post on how a physicist who studies parachutes helped solve the mystery of big gulps.
Originally published December 9, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
A lot of people are interested in my Slate story yesterday on the arsenic aliens. It’s still the most-read story of the site at the moment, Slashdot and others have linked to it, and I’m doing some more radio and maybe other media (details to come).
Continue reading “Of arsenic and aliens: What the critics said”
Psychology Today, December 8, 2010
The future is not new. By the dawn of the 20th century science was moving so fast many people were sure humans were on the verge of tremendous change. The blogger Matt Novak collects entertainingly bad predictions at his website Paleo-Future. My favorite is a 1900 article by John Watkins that appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, offering readers a long list of predictions from leading thinkers of the day about what life would be like within the next 100 years.
“A man or woman unable to walk 10 miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling,” Watkins wrote. “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet.”
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing some posts over at Psychology Today in conjunction with the publication of Brain Cuttings. Here’smy first, on the hazards of trying to predict the future of the brain.
Originally published December 8, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.