The second annual World Science Festival will be taking place in New York next month. I’ll be moderating a panel called, “Wall-E’s World: Designs for an Invisible Footprint.”
Continue reading “Talking Trash at The World Science Festival”
Thanks to everyone who’s voted so far on the cover for The Tangled Bank. As of Monday evening, 641 people have voted. That’s not a focus group–it’s a focus army. If you haven’t voted yet, please do–I’ll check in from time to time to see how the pie slices morph.
[Update 4:30 pm: I left off one of the covers (Tiktaalik3) from the original poll. You can re-vote now.]
Greetings, readers. I write to you from that frenzy towards the end of writing a book when everything has to be done at once and the sight of the incoming pincers makes me freeze like a deer in the…pincers. See, I can’t even come up with a good metaphor right now.
Continue reading “A Request For The Design Hive Mind: Vote For A Tangled Bank Book Cover”
This piece in Agence Science Presse appears to be about the future of science journalism. If Google Translate is right, my place in that future appears to be in some type of shrubbery.
Perhaps someone who hasn’t forgotten quite so much of his or her high school French will understand what’s going on here.
Originally published May 6, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
You have to hand it to those little flu viruses–with just a few genes apiece, they can infect us humans by the millions, and we can barely keep up with their evolution. In tomorrow’s New York Times, I’ve written a natural history of the flu, looking at how influenza viruses mutate, swap genes, undergo natural selection, cross species barriers, and adapt to new hosts. The new strain of swine flu (or perhaps more precisely, the new strain of human-and-bird-flu-viruses-swirled-up-inside-pigs-and-then-mixed-with-other-pig-viruses-that-descend-from-human-and-bird-flus-as-well) is just the latest chapter in this baroque evolutionary tale.
Originally published May 4, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.