Thanks to everyone who nominated posts from the Loom for 3 Quarks Daily’s Science Prize. Now it’s time to vote!

If you need some background information on the prize, go here. You can then peruse the list of nominated posts here. Great stuff abounds, so you won’t hurt my feelings if you decide someone else’s post is the best! When you’re ready, vote here. The deadline is June 7, 11:59 PM eastern time.

The top 20 vote-getting posts will then be judged by the folks at 3 Quarks Daily, who will then pass their top 6 to Richard Dawkins. Dawkins will then select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winner. Winners will be announced June 21, 2010.

Originally published June 4, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

This morning I talked with Nobel-prize-winning physicist John Mather and a few dozen high school students from New York, Kansas, Florida, and Ghana at the World Science Festival. In a testament to the maturity of videoconferencing technology, we actually had a fantastic conversation, which consisted in large part of the students peppering Mather about cosmology, his area of expertise. I remember well being 14 and thinking to myself, “So…wait a minute…if the universe is expanding, what’s it expanding into?” But I didn’t get to ask the person who built the COBE satellite that actually found some of the key evidence for the Big Bang. So I was a little jealous today.

Continue reading “And Have You Ever Met This Gentleman Before? No, Sir, I Have Not.” →

NPR’s Jon Hamilton has a nice piece on Einstein’s brain, and what might have made it special. The difference doesn’t seem to have to do with its neurons, but with the other cells of the brain, the glia. I wrote about the glia–what I called the dark matter of the brain–in this Discover column last fall.

Originally published June 2, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Bacteria and other microbes suck up and blast out vast amounts of greenhouse gases. Over at Yale Environment 360, I take a look at how they will behave in a world warming up as we inject carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Will they draw down some of the extra CO2, or will the heat spur them to spew out more? Or both? The answer isn’t clear yet, but it’s important. After all, it’s a microbial planet, and we just live on it. Check it out.

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Originally published June 1, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.