Friday’s Elk, December 18, 2015

Greetings–

Like many of you, I’m in a final scramble to finish off a ridiculous to-do list before the holidays hit me like a falling grand piano. So this will probably be the last issue of Friday’s Elk I’ll send out for 2015. I’ll be up and running again on January 8, 2016. So here’s a quick look at the old and the new.

The Evolution of a Good Night’s Rest

As primates go, we sleep very little and spend a lot of that time dreaming. This week in the New York Times, I write about a new study that seeks to explain how we ended up this way, and how sleep may have played a big role in human evolution.

Viruses to Cure Your Ills

Here’s another video I made with Business Insider. It’s about phage therapy, the long-dreamed-of strategy to use viruses to kill disease-causing bacteria.

Longform Picks for 2015

The fabulous curation site Longform asked me to pitch in to select some of 2015’s best science writing. Here’s what my colleagues and I picked.

A Science Writing Workshop

Each January I teach a two-part workshop about science writing at Yale. I originally designed it for Yale science graduate students, but we’ve loosened up over the years, so if you’re in the area and interested, you can get in touch with the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Yale to inquire about registering. Here is the workshop plan and the assigned reading.

The Talks

January 28, 2016: the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ: Details to come.

June 23-25 International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Durham North Carolina. Here’s the meeting site.

July 31. I’ll be giving the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah

The End

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Best wishes, Carl