I’m going to be appearing this weekend on the strangely addictive show bloggingheads.tv. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a show composed of two talking heads staring out of your screen at you, holding forth for an hour on whatever topic they choose (politics, television, science…). Actually, each speaker is staring into a computer camera and talking on the phone to his or her partner in chat. On Saturdays, two of our most provocative science writers, John Horgan and George Johnson, take to the tubes.
It is a day to write about Giardia, and I am happy to say that I cannot do so from firsthand experience. Friends of mine have suffered infections of Giardia in their gut, but they haven’t been terribly forthcoming about the details. It’s not fun, they assure me, and it can last for months. Unpleasant as it may be up close, though, Giardia is one of the most fascinating, most enigmatic creatures on the planet (from a safe distance). Scientists do not yet quite know what to make of this single-celled parasite, but one possibility is that Giardia holds secrets to some of the key steps in the evolution of our own ancestors billions years ago.
A while back I mentioned I’ve gotten a Facebook page and a Myspace page. They’ve been fun to toy around with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re a harbinger of how we will all trawl for online information in the future. But to those who are asking to be friends at Myspace, leaving messages for me, or just wondeirng why the page is just so lame, I’m sorry to report that I haven’t been able to log in for a few days. If my kids were just a couple years older, I’m sure I’d have all the tech support I needed to deal with this. But for now, or at least until the MySpace minions come to my aid, it’s all about Facebook.
Continue reading “The Aging Brain Meets The Future of Social Networking”
Best Life Magazine, September 22, 2007
If he hadn’t been savaged by a lion, Steven Austad might never have discovered the elasticity of aging. Just out of college, he became friends with a lion trainer who rented animals to movie studios. Soon he was in Hollywood, working with exotic felines. One morning, he was walking Orville, a 300-pound lion, when a duck darted out from some reeds. The 2-year-old lion pounced, and Austad disciplined the big cat with a slap on the head. Orville released the duck, but then pounced on Austad. He knocked Austad down and sunk his teeth into Austad’s knee. Austad didn’t struggle because he knew lions are possessive of their food and Orville might lunge for his neck next. So he waited…for 15 minutes…with the lion gnawing on his leg. Finally, another trainer spotted him and sprayed Orville with a fire extinguisher. Austad spent six days in the hospital and realized that he needed to find a safer, more rewarding way to work with animals. He became a biologist and traveled the world, ending up on the remote savannas of Venezuela, studying a less frisky animal, the opossum. Continue reading “Could He Live to 2150?”
It’s a brave new world for us book authors. Today’s case in point: PZ Myers assigned some of his students to ready my book Soul Made Flesh, which chronicles how humanity figured out what the brain is for. Some of his students have bravely agreed to post their reports on the book on Myers’s blog Pharyngula (here and here). The comment thread has turned into a wide-ranging book-club discussion. I’m chiming in from time to time too (here and here, for example). I’m definitely enjoying it and will check in as long as the discussion goes.
Originally published September 21, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.