Birds do it, bees do it, even educated viruses do it. And for some reason my stack of interesting scientific papers is particularly heavy at the moment with research on the evolution of sex. So let’s not be shy. All this week, I will blog about sex.
[Image: mating sand wasps, Alex Wild]
Originally published July 26, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
It’s terrifying to think that we’re weeks away from the fall semester, but so it seems. I will once more be teaching an upper-level seminar at Yale called “Writing About Science and the Environment.” Last year’s class was a wonderful experience, and I’m hoping to apply some of the lessons I learned about teaching to this fall’s edition.
I’ve just uploaded my new and improved syllabus to the Yale web site. So if you are at Yale (undergraduate or graduate), check it out at the university course information page (search for EVST 215) and please consider applying.
And if you’re not interested, please pass on this information to anyone you think might be.
And finally, if anyone has any questions about the class, don’t hesitate to email me.
Originally published July 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
While I was away last week on vacation, the New York Times published my feature on the hidden jungle that each of us carries, known as the microbiome. I was very happy to come home to a lot of kind notes, tweets, and various communications about it. Yet I would never claim that my article delivered the Big Scoop on the subject. After all, we’ve known about the microbiome ever since Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek scraped his teeth over 300 years ago and discovered wee animacules in the scum. And as I wrote in my book Microcosm, Theodor Escherich discovered his eponymous Escherichia coli over a century ago in a quest to catalog the good microbes in babies’s guts, hoping to thereby identify the ones that were killing the children in droves. Even in the age of molecular biology, the microbiome has been well-chronicled. Jessica Snyder Sachs wrote a book back in 2007 called Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World that I heartily endorsed (and still do).
I gave a talk at the President’s Forum at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in May about how I go about telling stories about science. The folks at ASM have done some slick video editing and posted the lecture at their site, where you can also download it in various formats. Or just watch it in the embedded player below. In my lecture, I talk about getting out of bunkers and jumping chasms, as well as the trouble parasites can get you into on a blind date.
MWV39 – Carl Zimmer: Newspapers, Blogs, and Other Vectors: Infecting Minds with Science in the Age of New Media from microbeworld on Vimeo.
Originally published July 19, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
The force of blog nature known as BORA! has decided he does not like the Pepsi aftertaste and is leaving Scienceblogs. I’m just back from a wonderfully rain-soaked vacation in Ireland, so I’m scrambling to get back up to speed. I won’t update my post on the scienceblogs diaspora till this afternoon. But in the meantime, read the epic farewell from BORA!
Originally published July 19, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.