Hard believe it, but here’s the last Friday’s Elk of summer vacation…
I recently paid a visit to the lab of Jessica Whited, an assistant professor in the orthopedic surgery department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Whited doesn’t study people. Instead, she studies a spooky salamander called the axolotl. What makes the axolotl amazing is that it can regrow and entire leg in a matter of days. Whited is studying its powers of regeneration in the hopes of finding lessons that doctors can apply to people, coaxing our own bodies to fix themselves. I profile Whited in my latest “Science Happens!” video for Stat.
The Brooklyn Book Festival has now posted the details for my talk on September 18. I’m joining fellow microbial enthusiasts Ed Yong and Sonia Shah to talk about bacteria, viruses, and how they protect and destroy us.
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details here.
September 15: Washington DC. “The Emergence of Life: On the Earth, in the Lab, and Elsewhere.” Panel discussion at a daylong public conference at the Library of Congress.
September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. A panel on bacteria and viruses with Ed Yong and Sonia Shah. Details here.
October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published August 26, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.