The Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology has rolled out the “Stevens Seventy,” the seventy greatest science books since 1900. If you click all the way through to Z, my 2000 book Parasite Rex ends the list. Many thanks.
As the introduction to the list points out, these things are always arbitrary, so judge for yourself. Did they leave any classics off? Did they honor an unworthy title?
Originally published November 29, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
I just noticed that in the new issue of the New Yorker Michael Specter has written an article on the viruses in our genome. I wrote about this research in the New York Times a year ago. I haven’t had a chance to read the article through yet, but I was mortified to come across this line…
Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short.
For my latest “Dissection” column in Wired, I take a look at the tree of life, and the way it changed dramatically thirty years ago this month. To get a sense of what the tree looks like today, I pointed readers to the wonderful interactive tree of life at the European Molecular Biology Lab. But I didn’t realize until after I finished the column that when you scroll over the branches of the tree, pictures pop up of species at their tips. Most of the pictures are of assorted chains, blobs, and other microbial portraits. But things get more interesting in the animal kingdom. Iz very nice!
Hat tip: Delightfully So
Wired, November 27, 2007
Some of the greatest moments in the history of biology slip from the world’s memory, their anniversaries hardly noticed among the wars, bankruptcies and celebrity detoxifications. But before this month passes, let us stop to remember one of those great moments that came 30 years ago, in November 1977: the death knell of the animal kingdom.
The animal kingdom’s decline came in the form of a three-page paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its lead author, Carl Woese, had spent the previous few years trying to find a way to figure out the relationship of all living things, including microbes. A taxonomist can classify a giraffe, a bat and a human as mammals simply by looking at them. They have hair, for example, and they nurse. But microbes are harder to make sense of. They might simply look like a rod or a sphere.
Continue reading “The Decline and Fall of the Animal Kingdom”
Once the writers’ strike is over, anyone in the mood to make a new monster movie might consider this beast, described today in the journal Biology Letters. It’s Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a “sea scorpion” that lived 390 million years ago. Based on a fossil of its enormous claws was found in Germany, scientists estimate it measured 2.5 meters long. It’s the biggest arthropod yet known, a giant among giants. At this period in the history of life, lots of insects, millipedes, and other sea scorpions grew to science-fiction sizes, possibly thanks to the high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time. Our own ancestors–lobe-fin fish–might well have been the hapless prey of this spineless behemoth.
Continue reading “A Monster To Remember After the Writers’ Strike”