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.
When I first learned about the fungus Cordyceps, I refused to believe.
I was working on a book about the glories of parasites, so I was already in the parasitic tank, you could say. But when I read about how Cordyceps infects its insect hosts, I thought, this simply cannot be. The spores penetrate an insect’s exoskeleton and then work their way into its body, where fungus then starts to grow. Meanwhile, the insect wanders up a plant and clamps down, whereupon Cordyceps grows a long stalk that sprouts of the dead host’s body. It can then shower down spores on unfortunate insects below.
I mean, really.
My latest story for the New York Times has just gone online. It continues my string of stories in which I look at the familiar and find it deeply strange. The previous one was about fireflies. Tomorrow’s story is about the surface of the ocean. It turns out to be a deeply weird thing–a gelatinous biofilm inhabited by a peculiar menagerie of microbes that play a vital role in our own well-being.
Originally published July 27, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
The National Institutes of Health funds research on the biology of morality in the human brain, as well as the evolution of human morality by comparing humans to other primates. Francis Collins, who has been nominated to head NIH, has repeatedly criticized this sort of research–and has used its failure as evidence for the existence of God. In 2008, for example, he said, “I think human altruism can be seen as one of strongest signposts to the existence of a personal God. I can see no fully satisfactory explanation for it coming from biology.”