Greetings–
Happy New Year! I’d like to welcome all the new subscribers who joined us here during the holiday hiatus. I hope you’ll enjoy Friday’s Elk in 2016 and beyond. Each week I send out a relatively brief email to bring subscribers up to date with the stuff I’ve been publishing, along with talks I’m giving and any other relevant news.
If you’re curious about what sort of stuff you can expect here, you might want to check out the things I was up to in 2015. For example, here’s a story I wrote for the New York Times about how becoming a mother means becoming a chimera. And here’s an episode of Radiolab where I talked to Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich about editing genes. You can find an archive of my stories and information about my books on my web site. I also set up a Pinterest board with links to my talks that are available online.
Okay–now here’s what I’ve been up to since the last Friday’s Elk…
A man died in the Alps 5,300 years ago, and his body was dug out of the ice in 1991. For the past quarter-century scientists have been probing his body to learn about what life was like in ancient Europe. In Stat this week, I write about how scientists have now discovered bacteria in his stomach that cause ulcers and gastric cancer in living people. The study offers some clues to the early roots of modern health.
Our brains switch genes on and off in a daily 24-hour cycle. The brain’s inner clock may be important to our long-term mental health. On December 28, I wrote a column for The New York Times about scientists who look at donated brains to catch our clocks in action. They can even see how those clocks change over our lifetime.
Our ancestors 800 million years ago evolved from single-celled organisms into the first animals. Now we have trillions of cells in our bodies, which develop into hundreds of cell types and tissues. A team of scientists have taken an exquisitely close look at that transition, by looking at how a single molecule evolved into a tool for dividing animal cells and turning them into animal bodies. I tell the story this week in The New York Times.
The New York Times asked its science writers to look back at 2015 and reflect on the big stories of the year. I wrote about a cluster of columns in which I explored how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into early humans history.
Stat, meanwhile, asked its writers to look ahead to medical news in 2016. I tried to separate some of the hype about gene editing and epigenetics from the real promise for the year to come.
I contributed a chapter to the upcoming book Science Blogging: The Essential Guide. You can order it now; it comes out on March 1.
I talked to the folks at Tumble, a podcast about science for kids and their parents, about what the world would be like without parasites. Hint: less icky, yes, but not so good either. If that talk whets your appetite, I wrote a whole book about the hidden importance (and coolness) of parasites.
In October I gave a talk at the annual conference of the National Society of Genetic Counselors about how gene editing technology could pose new ethical quandaries. The video is now on Youtube.
January 28, 2016: the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ. I’ll talk about how parasites can control their hosts’ minds. 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
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published January 8, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.