I’ve been following the research of primatologist Frans de Waal on peacemaking among primates for a long time. Earlier this month I finally got to meet him in New York, where we had a conversation about his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.
I’ve embedded the first of a series of excerpts you can watch on YouTube. You can find all the excerpts here.
Originally published January 26, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
If you’ve never played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, take a trip to the Oracle of Bacon, where you can see how far any actor is from Bacon in the Hollywood movie network.
And once you’ve played that game, check out my new article at Yale Environment 360 to see how ecosystems are a lot like Hollywood, at least when it comes to networking.
For more on ecological network theory, check out Jordi Bascompte’s web site.
Originally published January 25, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Here’s a talk I just gave on Big Think–about viruses, synthetic biology, and tapeworms that carry my name. The sound quality isn’t as good as I’d like, but I hope the words make up for it.
Originally published January 25, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Yale Environment 360, January 25, 2010
Ecologists who want to save the world’s biodiversity could learn a lot from Kevin Bacon.
One evening in 1994, three college students in Pennsylvania were watching Bacon in the eminently forgettable basketball movie The Air Up There. They started thinking about all the movies Bacon had starred in, and all the actors he had worked with, and all the actors those actors had worked with. The students came up with a game they called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, counting the steps from Bacon to any actor in Hollywood. In general, it takes remarkably few steps to reach him.
Continue reading “Network Theory: A Key to Unraveling How Nature Works”
In my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, I describe how this humble germ helped make modern biology possible–and, in the process, has been engineered to do all sorts of remarkable things. In 2008, I blogged a fresh example, courtesy of Jeff Hasty and his colleagues. They retooled the bacteria to flash in clock-like rhythms. Now Hasty has taken another step forward, rejiggering E. coli so that millions of bacteria can flash in waves. The new paper’s in Nature, and the journal put together a lovely video of the bacteria in hive-mind performance. Check it out below.
Originally published January 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.