Yesterday I passed on some grim news about a virus sweeping through bonobos. Some readers had questions, such as whether there was a quarantine and exactly what sort of virus is on the attack. Vanessa Woods kindly sent this email just now from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Continue reading “Bonobo Outbreak: Update from Democratic Republic of Congo”
This is quite an honor, although the list of honorees is exactly backwards. If you’ve dedicated your career to fighting HIV or heart disease, let me step aside so you can head straight to the front of the line. I’ll just hang back and see if I can get an autograph from Bobby Baccalieri from the Sopranos.
Originally published April 2, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Bonobos, along with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. Unfortunately the entire species has dwindled down to a few thousand survivors, all in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This morning I got a worrying email from Vanessa Woods, a bonobo expert who’s at a bonobo research facility in DRC:
In connection with my recent lecture on life, I had a good interview with the local NPR station in Oklahoma. We talked about making life from scratch, Microcosm, and the microbes that are eavesdropping on you from the inside. You can listen to it on this embedded player below, or download it from the KWGS web site.
Originally published April 2, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
There’s a lot of dismally wrong coverage of global warming these days (see some recent examples chronicled by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, for example). But the way global warming gets treated on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post–particularly by George Will and his enabling editors–is particularly exquisite. For my little Ahab-like obsession with the editorial process there, check out this string of posts. Many other observers have made similar points, so you’d think that somebody over at the Post might have learned something from the experience.
Today, we see that they haven’t.