loom
Posts by this author
Scientists often stick genes into organism in order to create something new. Remote-controlled flies, for example, or photographic E. coli. But by creating new kinds of life, scientists can also learn about the history of life. Give a mouse human vision, for example, and you may learn something…
Next week I'll be heading to Utah. Southern Utah University asked me to be their Visiting Eccles Scholar, which means that I'll be spending a couple days talking with students and faculty. I'll also be giving two talks that are open to the public. The first, Wednesday evening, will be on global…
Science moves forward by flow. One experiment leads to another. Observations accrue. What seem like side trips or even dead ends may bring a fuzzy picture further into focus. Yet science often seems as if it moves forward one bombshell at a time, marked by scientific papers and press conferences. I…
Perhaps the notion of conservatives building an alternative to Wikipedia that includes many "scientific" entries based on creationist books aimed at seventh graders sounds like some bizarre hoax. For those who doubt, there's now audio evidence.
National Public Radio ran a segment yesterday in which…
Dinosaurs had small genomes. At least some of them did--the ones that gave rise to birds. If you have access to Science, you can read my News Focus article on the new field of "dinogenomics." As I mentioned last week, my web site carlzimmer.com is in serious overhaul, so as soon as it's ready, I'll…
If pubic lice are not the sort of thing you want to be seen reading about, let me give you the opportunity to close your browser window right now. But if you're at all curious about the secret that pubic lice have been keeping for over three million years, the tale of a mysterious liaison between…
Josh at Thoughts from Kansas makes some good points today about the need for more systematists (scientists who describe new species), launching his musings from an article in today's New York Times about the remarkable Eastern Arc mountains by...d'oh! That was by me. Man, I have got to do a better…
Forbes.com contacted me a few weeks ago to write a piece for a special report they were putting together on the theme of achievement. They asked me if I'd write something about "reproductive achievement." As the father of two children--who will merely replace me and my wife in the human species…
Just a quick note: I'm in the process of changing hosts for my web site, carlzimmer.com. Once the transfer is done, you should be able to get to the article archive, book pages, and all the rest once more. The down time shouldn't last too long. The site will also be going through some long overdue…
In January, Scientific American ran an article by me about the evolutionary roots of cancer, which you can read here (and about which I blogged here). Now, via Respectful Ignorance Respectful Insolence [d'oh!], I've discovered a new review on said subject in the March issue of the journal Nature…
This morning I noticed that on top of my blog there's an ad for an upcoming show on the Discovery Channel that claims to reveal the tomb of Jesus and his family. I haven't seen a preview of the show, and from an article in this morning's NY Times, I have very little interest in doing so:
The…
I suspect poking around Conservapedia will become one of my new tools for procrastination. You're guaranteed a jaw drop within a couple minutes of searching on this Wikipedia for conservatives. It occurred to me that I had not yet bothered to look up "creationism." The entry is a whiplash of a read…
My ancestry forms a smear across northern and central Europe, a region of the world where many people have a peculiar gift: they can drink milk as adults. Almost all people can digest milk sugar (lactose) as babies, but in many parts of the world they lose this ability after they stop nursing. The…
Tomrrow I'm heading down to New York to take part in the "Inside Out" speaker series at New York University's Department of Journalism. John Rennie, editor-in-chief at Scientific American, and I will try to answer the question, "Can two prominent magazine journalists find happiness blogging?" The…
Loyalty, teamwork, cruel deception: welcome to robot evolution.
Living things communicate all the time. They bark, they glow, they make a stink, they thwack the ground. How their communication evolved is the sort of big question that keeps lots of biologists busy for entire careers. One of the…
The Koufax awards are among the biggest honors out here in the blogmos. It just came to my attention that the Loom has been nominated in the category of best writing. Of course, I'm packed in with lots of excellent blogs, so if you plan to vote, you've got lots of reading ahead of you. When voting…
There was a time--in the 1960s and 1970s--when the phrase "Man the Hunter" enjoyed a lot of popularity. Some researchers claimed that the evolution of hunting played a key role in the origin of our lineage. That's what we made tools for, and that's how we got all the extra energy to fuel our big…
Behold conservapedia, which calls itself "an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America"--and where we don't like Wikipedia at all. My fellow Sciencebloggers have been finding all sorts of factual troubles with the site over the past few days. I didn't think I had all…
Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land…
The latest joy from the Discovery Institute: an attempt to make dodos look scary.
There are six and a half billion human stomachs on this little planet of ours, and over half of them are home to a microbe called Helicobacter pylori. Scientists have known about the bacteria since the late 1800s, but it wasn't until the 1980s that Australian doctors noticed that H. pylori was in…
In celebration of Darwin's 198th birthday, there will be lots of events--talks, etc.--going on around the world next week. I'll be doing my part, heading to the Rockies to talk at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. My talk is entitled, "The Descent of Man, From Darwin to DNA." I'll be…
Speaking of hobbits, the paperback edition of my human evolution book is just about to come out, and you can order it now on Amazon. And if you prefer the resounding thwack of hard covers, the hardback edition is still available. For information on the innards of the book, see this post from last…
Could 2007 see some new hobbits? I certainly hope so.
In October 2004, a team of scientists announced they had found bones of a hominid from the Indonesian island of Flores. They came to the astonishing conclusion that the bones belonged to a new species, which they called Homo floresiensis, which…
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is about to release its newest edition of its report on global warming. In this AP report, one of the scientists who co-authored part of the IPCC study promises that it will contain much more than a smoking gun. It will contain "a batallion of…
Mark Twain once discovered to his horror that his story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" had been hideously translated into French. He went so far as to publish the original story, the translation, and his own retranslation of the French back to English to show just how badly it had been…
Over at Blog around the Clock, Bora has the details on the new science blog anthology book he has put together and which is now for sale. (My posts on eye evolution (1, 2) are included.)
Bora apparently got the idea for his book three weeks ago, and now he's got an honest-to-goodness tome between…
Cancer, many biologists aruge argue, is an evolutionary disease. It is a burden of being multicellular, and a threat against which natural selection has only managed mediocre defenses. Making matters worse, cancer cells can borrow highly evolved genes for their own deadly purposes. And even within…
On the last day of December, I turned in the final draft of my book about E. coli and the meaning of life. This is the sixth time around for me, and I'm getting familiar now with the havoc the experience wreaks on my nerves. In the final few weeks, the book becomes a monster that follows me around…
One reason I love writing about biology is that it has so many levels. Down at the molecular scale, proteins flop and twist. Higher up, cells crawl and feed and divide. They organize into animals and plants and other big organisms, which must obey their own rules in order to survive. For some…