The next few months are shaping up to be pretty busy with talks. Here’s my list so far–more details to come as the dates approach, and more talks to be added soon. If you’re in the neighborhood (or at the meeting, as the case may be), come on by… Continue reading “Yammerings: the 2011 edition!”
When it rains it pours. A bunch of stories I’ve been working on for a while have all surfaced over the past week. Here’s the very last…for now: my new Discover brain column. The topic is music. What is it? What is it for, if anything?
Continue reading “My new Discover brain column: Music and the brain”
As I report in today’s New York Times, scientists have sequenced the full genome from a 50,000-year-old finger bone from a Siberian cave, and they’ve concluded it belonged to a new lineage of humans they call Denisovans. These Denisovans, they argue, share an ancient common ancestor with us that lived, perhaps, 600,000 years ago–long before our species Homo sapiens arose. A couple hundred thousand years later, their branch of hominin evolution split, with one lineage evolving into Neanderthals, and the other into Denisovans. Much later, the Denisovans mated with Homo sapiens expanding out of Africa into southeast Asia, and today their DNA can still be found in the people of New Guinea and neighboring islands.
Continue reading “Denisovans: Ordinary humans with extraordinary genes?”
Scientific American is featuring an excerpt from Brain Cuttings, my new e-book about the frontiers of neuroscience. It’s an account of my wanderings through the science fiction world of the Singularity, pondering whether we’ll be uploading our brains someday to computers. The piece started out as an assignment for Playboy, which they published earlier this year; I then reworked the piece for the e-book. Check it out.
And if you have a subscription to Scientific American, please check out my feature in the January 2011 issue, called “100 Trillion Connections.” There, I expand on one of the key topics I discuss in my e-book excerpt: how the brain is a network of networks (of networks), and only by understanding their organization will we finally come to terms with the complexity of the mind.
Originally published December 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, December 22, 2010
An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.
All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.
Continue reading “Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals”