Paleontologists don’t go looking for brains, and I’m not surprised. I once got to hold a fresh brain in my hands (it was at a medical school–nothing fishy, I promise), and I can vouch that they are marvelously delicate: a custard for thinking. When any vertebrate with a brain dies, be it human, turtle, or guppy, that fragile greasy clump of neurons is one of the first organs to vanish. Scientists must infer what ancient brains were like very often by examining the case that held it–that is, if they can find a relatively intact braincase.

Continue reading “The 300-Million-Year-Old Brain: Now In 3-D” →

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been blogging about the problems newspaper opinion pages have with science. The example I’ve focused on is two columns on global warming by George Will in the Washington Post (and syndicated to 300 newspapers). Will claims that scientists who point to evidence that global warming is having an effect on the planet and reporters who describe their research are all hysterical doomsayers. To make his point, Will offers a range of evidence, from accounts in the 1970s about global cooling to statistics about the area of global ice cover recorded by satellites.

Continue reading “Ice, Ice Baby: When Fact-Checking Is Not Fact-Checking” →

An anonymous reader writes, “The Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 was one of the big events that really got me into science and astronomy. My dad and I went to our local planetarium, which was live-streaming the images from NASA as they came in. Even though I don’t really work in astronomy now, I wanted a tattoo to commemorate my continued love of astronomy and one of my dearest childhood memories. My tattoo is the Voyager 2 spacecraft with Neptune and Triton.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Originally published February 28, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

[Correction appended]

I guess I don’t understand editorial pages. The laws of physics must be different there.

Chapter 1: A Correction

On February 15, George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post, in which he scoffed at dire warnings about the effects of global warming. He claimed that environmental pessimists are always warning about catastrophes that never come. And he offered a series of claims about the climate that added up to a larger claim about the lack of evidence of global warming. For example:

Continue reading “Unchecked Ice: A Saga in Five Chapters” →