Blogs / The Loom

The Boston Globe has set up an insanely beautiful feature called “The Big Picture.” Each week, they pick out a dozen or more stunning pictures on some topic and display them at huge size. The latest theme is “Earth From Above,” and the pictures are all from photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. I don’t know why, but this picture really spoke to me (click through for the full size shot). It’s a fresh expanse of lava in Iceland that has cooled down enough for moss and other organisms to colonize it. Life always finds a way.

Conservation Magazine is a snazzy publication from the Society of Conservation Biology that sports some great writers and great graphics. I was pleased to be asked to contribute a piece about some of my favorite living things–parasites. In particular, I look at new research that shows just how integral parasites are to the well-being of ecosystems. It’s just come out in the latest issue. Check it out.

Steve Mirsky at Science Talk, the podcast of Scientific American , interviewed me about my story on intelligence–in the middle of a bad cold. I think my intelligence was affected…Listen here.

I just got back from a pretty remarkable lecture by the husband-and-wife team of Peter and Rosemary Grant. The Grants started studying Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands in 1973, and they made some of the most detailed studies of evolution in the wild ever carried out. Their adventures were chronicled 14 years ago by Jonathan Weiner in the Beak of the Finch, which won the Pulitzer Prize. But the Grants did not stop. They continued to observe the birds evolve, and make fascinating new discoveries. In 2002, I wrote an article on what they’d learned after some three decades of research. Six years have passed since then, and at today’s lecture I learned that they retired from Princeton just last month. But apparently they’re still going back to the Galapagos. So their lecture today was not a summing up, but yet another status report.

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I’ll be talking today on “Word of Mouth” on New Hampshire Public Radio at noon EST. The topic will be my new article on the biology of intelligence in Scientific American. Listen here.

Update: The segment is archived here.

We’ve cast our votes…and here are the winners. As a judge, let me extend best wishes to the winners and all the entrants to the National Academies of Sciences Communication Award.

Thadd writes: “I got this archaeology themed tattoo today, somewhat inspired by your science tattoos.   It was inspired by a relief at Persepolis created under the Persian emperor Darius II.   It depicts a winged sun disk, likely showing the god Ahura Mazda, in this case, but was used as an icon for important deities in Assyria, Egypt, Judah, Urartu, and throughout most of the ancient Near East.”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

If you live in striking distance of Columbus Circle in Manhattan, come on over to Borders at 7 pm tomorrow. I’ll be speaking on a panel about The Best American Science Writing 2008, which is just out. I’ll talk about cancer as a nasty side effect of evolution, and Pulitzer-prize winner Amy Harmon will talk about what it’s like to face life with a lethal gene. This year’s editor, author Sylvia Nasar, and the series editor Jesse Cohen will be there too.

In the latest issue of Scientific American, I have a feature on the biology of intelligence. (Read it online at sciam.com or carlzimmer.com) I’ve been fascinated by the subject for a long time, and I decided recently that the time was right to put together an article.

What’s the news? That there is no news.

Allow me to explain…

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Have you ever seen a fungus firing its spores to the tune of the Anvil Chorus from Il Travatore?

I’ll take that as a no.

Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has been playing around with very fast video. Ultra fast. As in 250,000 frames-a-second fast. He knew exactly what this kind of video was made for. To film fungi that live on dung as they discharge their spores. These tiny fungi can blast spores as far as six feet away, boosting the odds that they’ll land on a clean plant that a cow or other grazing animal may eat. The fungi develop inside the animal, get pooped out with its dung, and fire their spores once more.

Money’s results were not just significant, but beautiful. The fungi fire their spores up to 55 miles an hour–which translates to an acceleration of 180,000 g. Money calls it “the fastest flight in nature.”

Money has just published his results in the journal PLOS One, and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created the first fungus opera. Behold:

A reminder and an anouncement:

1. I’ll be speaking Wednesday at the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ. The topic will be my new book, Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. I’ll be speaking at 4 pm at the Babbio Center. (Here’s a campus map.)

2. Next Thursday, September 25, at 7 pm, I will be on a panel at Border’s Book at Columbus Circle in Manhattan. I’ll be joining Sylvia Nasar and Pulitzer-prize-winner Amy Harmon to talk about The Best American Science Writing 2008, which has just been published. (Take a browse online here.)

The Alliance for Science is running an essay contest for high school students, on the subject of Darwin. The top four winners will get cash prizes, plus a couple books, including one of mine, Microcosm. Spread the word!