I’m heading off to Appledore Island for a few blog-free days of yapping sea gulls and dissected sharks. I’ll schedule a few science tattoo posts for while I’m gone, but I will be mum till my return.
Originally published August 8, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
Well, Jason Bond fared pretty well on the Colbert Report, as Colbert picked a spider to be named after him. (Actually, the species name was already in the bag–or rather, in press.)
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Spida of Love – Jason Bond | ||||
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Prospect Magazine picks Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life as a a book to pack for your summer vacation:
“Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm: E Coli and the New Science of Life (Pantheon Books) delivers what a science book should; it reveals the new and re-enchants the old. By looking at the process common to all life through the prism of an organism with no public persona to distract us–the bacterium Escherichia coli, uncomplaining workhorse of ten thousand laboratories, unobserved and mostly benign passenger in the guts of us all–he is able to draw out all sorts of implications form one of the 20th century’s great discoveries.
This should be interesting. In the June issue of Scientific American, I wrote an article called “What Is A Species?” I wrote about the challenges scientists face in drawing a line between species, especially when they have only recently diverged from a common ancestor and are still interbreeding. One of the best examples of how scientists tackle this challenge came out of a conversation I had with Jason Bond, an East Carolina University biologist who studies trapdoor-building spiders. In the article I explained how he studies the evolutionary history of the spiders, their adaptation to ecolical niches, and the flow of genes from one population to another. Combining these lines of evidence, he then proposes new species.
Continue reading “Will Colbert Make The World’s First Species Delimitation Joke Tonight?”