Greetings–
This week at Stat I wrote about my experience as the father of a girl in a science fair. She had a great time, but I came away reminded of how problematic the science fair phenomenon has become. The piece triggered a lot of discussion on Twitter and Facebook, which Stat followed up with some thoughtful opinion pieces from science fair participants, sharing their own experiences. Also, physicist Chad Orzel chimed in about how parents can help kids think scientifically at home.
This week I wrote in the New York Times about a new study that reveals just how much of the tree of life is made up of bacteria. We animals are a mere twig. (I added the labels above to an original figure from the paper.)
Not sure how to feel about being referred to as a “Kardashian of science.” But there’s that.
Just a reminder that I’ll be at Fordham and Yale next week giving talks. If you live in the area, join us!
While working on my next book on heredity, I stumbled across something strange and surprising. I was making my way through a scanned version of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s classic 1915 book, The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity, when I came across the typed lyrics to a song that some library patron long ago slipped into the preface.
On Twitter, Dwayne Godwin kindly pointed me to a partial explanation. But I would love to know more about it…
April 21: New York. Fordham University. “Editing Life: The Strange Science of Engineering Humans, Altering Nature, and Bringing Species Back from Extinction” Details here.
April 23: Yale. Science & Storytelling Conference. Details here
June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award. Details here
June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here’s the meeting site.
June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, “Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA.” Details here.
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah. The talk is entitled, “Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany”
NEW!–> September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published April 15, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.