I’ve been quiet on the blog front for the past week thanks to some cross-country traveling for work and a few deadlines I must wrap up before turning to a new kind of experience–the pedagogical sort.
Yale Environment 360, August 3, 2009
In 1997, Arthur Weis found himself with an extra bucket of seeds. Weis, who was teaching at the University of California at Irvine at the time, had dispatched a student, Sheina Sim, to gather some field mustard seeds for a study. When Sim was done with her research, Weis was left with a lot of leftover seeds. For no particular reason, he decided not to throw the bucket out. “We just tossed it in a cold, dry incubator,” said Weis.
Weis is glad they did. When a severe drought struck southern California, Weis realized that he could use the extra bucket of seeds for an experiment. In 2004 he and his colleagues collected more field mustard seeds from the same sites that Sim had visited seven years earlier.
Continue reading “First Comes Global Warming, Then an Evolutionary Explosion”
A while back my web site was hacked and my archive of stories vanished. After switching servers, I left the site frozen in time while I dealt with more pressing matters. I’ve finally gotten a little stretch of free time to refresh my memory of Dreamweaver, and now the site is back up to date. Along with the archive, you can also find an updated list of past and future talks. I’m starting to make plans for talks about The Tangled Bank and the 15th anniversary of The Origin of Species this fall, and appearances are now just starting to fall into place. I expect more talks to pop up in the weeks to come, and I will be much more diligent in getting the information online quickly.
Originally published July 29, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Nature offers suggestions for summer reading in the latest issue, andMicrocosm is on the list. Don’t worry–just because the book is about E. coli doesn’t mean they’ll have to close the beach:
Continue reading “Bacteria on the Beach: Microcosm on Nature’s Summer Reading List”
The New York Academy of Science has set up a nice site documenting their Two Cultures meeting in May. On their video page, you can see the panel on the media where I spoke. Despite appearances, I am not the younger brother of Andy Revkin and Ira Flatow. And be sure to check the two videos from Dean Kamen, describing his robot competition for kids.
Originally published July 29, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.