I’ve been invited to give a few talks in the wake of my article in the New York Times on the microbiome, and so I’m prowling for beautiful images that drive home the fact that we are microbial rain forests, rather than sterile mammals. Below is my favorite image of the day.

It’s from a survey of microbes across people’s bodies, published last year in Science. The inner circle shows the major lineages of bacteria found in all the subjects in each part of the body, while the ring shows the ones found in some people but not others.

This picture was stuffed away in the supplementary materials for the paper, so I missed it the first time around. I’m glad I found it–it’s a new Vitruvian man for our microbiomic age.

Originally published October 3, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Shi-Hsia Hwa writes,

I’m a virologist in a biotech company in Singapore. Here’s my story: I’ve been interested in infectious diseases since I was a kid, because my father almost died of TB when he was an infant. I must have been the only kid who looked forward to mass vaccination days in school. For a field trip to the Philippines after my bachelor’s and my first job shortly thereafter, I had to be immunized against a lot of other things that the average person doesn’t.

Continue reading “The Vaccine Tree (Plus An Extended Deadline For The Science Ink Book) [Science Tattoo]” →

Charles Darwin wondered if animals were aware of themselves. Allowed to visit a rare orangutan in the London Zoo, he brought a mirror and observed the ape apparently make faces at its own reflection. It’s hard to say for sure that the orangutan really was aware that its reflection was its own. Over a century later, a scientist named George Gallup turned Darwin’s idea into a more rigorous test. He would secretly put a mark on an animal’s forehead and see if it noticed the difference the next time it passed a mirror.

Continue reading “Monkeys in the mirror and the nature of science” →

Three weeks from today I’ll be in New York to host a special screening of the movie Creation, a fictionalized account of Darwin’s life starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. It’s a collaboration between the Science and Arts program at CUNY and the Imagine Science Film Festival (for which I’m serving as judge). After the movie, I’ll moderate a talk with the director, John Amiel, and biologists Cliff Tabin and Sean Carroll (of deep homology fame). It should be an excellent evening.

Here are the details:

Wednesday, Oct 20, 7:00 PM

Elebash Recital Hall, at the CUNY Graduate Center on 5th Avenue at 35th St. (Map)

No reservations. First come, first seated.

Originally published September 29, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

I’ve got several announcements to post over the next few days. Many eggs are beginning to hatch.

Continue reading “Announcements, Announcements! First up: Michael Specter coming to Yale” →