Sometimes big movie production companies decide that they’d be better off not showing a movie in advance to the critics. They know that the reviews would probably do more harm than good. Looking back on the the Darwinius affair, I’m starting to wonder if the unveiling of this fossil was stage-managed in the same way.
Yesterday I blogged about how Darwinius, the famous fossil primate that will change everything, may not actually have a published named yet. The trouble is that the official rules seem to indicate that a paper in an electronic journal is not enough. Paper is required. A spirited discussion among scientists blossomed in the comment thread, which has morphed into a conversation about Science 2.0.
Continue reading “Does Darwinius Exist, Revisited: The Official Word Is…Not Yet.”
I’ve just discovered an online game called Killer Flu, presented by the UK Clinical Virology Network. I’ve been fairly leery of video games that try to present science in the past, because they either skimp on the science or skimp on the game. Killer Flu seems, on first inspection, to get fairly close to the happy medium.
You have to get a flu outbreak going in three months by infecting as many people as you can. There are lots of challenges, such as tough immune systems, and special tricks, such as infecting people who are likely to infect lots of other people. The game is bogged down by a few big blocks of text that pop up to explain how the flu virus spreads–something that a few paragraph breaks or separate windows could take care of easily. But those drawbacks are more than compensated by the elegant, SimCity like interface.
I’m curious what living, breathing virologists and epidemiologists think of it. All I know is that I am going to try to avoid this web site, because I have a lot of work to do today. And for me, that’s as high a compliment as I can pay to a game.
Originally published May 21, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Darwinius has achieved the ultimate triumph of pop-culture consciousness, having become for the moment the background image on the main Google search page. But some of the commenters in my post yesterday on the head-slapping hype around this fossil pointed out something I thought deserving of its own post: Darwinius may not actually exist.
Beyond three billion years ago, the fossil record of life on Earth gets very patchy. At 3.4 billion years ago, there’s fairly good evidence of mats of microbes. At 3.5 billion years, there are little globules that have been proposed to be bacteria but which some researchers consider just blogs blobs of minerals. Earlier still there are shadowy isotopic hints–ratios of light and heavy carbon atoms that seem biological rather than volcanic–dating back as far as 3.8 billion years. These, too, are the subject of great debate. And before that, nothing. Seven hundred million years of nothing.
Continue reading “Life On Earth: A Losing Game of Whack-A-Mole?”