Greetings–

It’s a short email today. Also, a head’s up that I won’t be sending out a Friday’s Elk next week. I’ll be back in touch in May. Happy Spring!
 

California’s Mysterious Foxes

About nine thousand years ago, gray foxes arrived on California’s Channel Islands. They’ve since evolved into a new species–a tiny animal that’s smaller than a house cat. In my column this week in The New York Times, I write about a new study that peers into their genomes–and finds next to no genetic variation. How they’ve survived with that kind of DNA is a mystery.

The Talks

TOMORROW–> 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”

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
 

The End
 

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Best wishes, Carl

Originally published April 22, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.