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Thursday, February 16: Science and social media panel in New York

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:57:18 +0000

Next week is Social Media Week, during which time the American Museum of Natural History is hosting an exploration of science and social media. It will take place on Thursday, 2/16, at 6 pm, and after the official panel discussion there will be a beer and wine reception in the Museum’s Hall of Minerals and Gems.

The panelists for the evening include–

Ben Lillie, the physicist turned spoken-word impresario who has founded the delightful Story Collider

Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

Ruth Cohen, Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at the American Museum of Natural History, who will talk about how the museum uses apps to help kids learn about urban biodiversity

–and me. I’ll talk about how social media (primarily the Loom) turned me into a curator of science tattoos and then an author of a decidedly unusual coffee table book.

The discussion will be moderated by Jennifer Kingson, an editor in the Science Department at The New York Times.

The event is free, but you need to register on the event page.

Life turned upside down

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:59:46 +0000

Thousands of papers get published every week, but every now and then a truly strange one pops up. On December 23, a new journal called Life published a paper by Case Western Reserve University biochemist Eric Andrulis called “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life.”

At Ars Technica, John Timmer unpacks this 105-page paper and delves into the weirdness, in a post called “How the craziest f#@!ing paper got published and promoted.”

The basic idea is that everything, from subatomic particles to living systems, is based on helical systems the author calls “gyres,” which transform matter, energy, and information. These transformations then determine the properties of various natural systems, living and otherwise. What are these gyres? It’s really hard to say; even Andrulis admits that they’re just “a straightforward and non-mathematical core model” (although he seems to think that’s a good thing). Just about everything can be derived from this core model; the author cites “major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet ...

Evolving Bodies: A Storify follow-up

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:51:57 +0000

In yesterday’s New York Times, I wrote about a new paper in which scientists report the evolution of single-celled yeast into multicellular snowflake-like “bodies.” Most (but not all) of the experts I contacted for the story had high praise for the study. (It also won an award when it was presented as a talk over the summer at the Society for the Study of Evolution.) Once the story appeared, however, some scientists took to Twitter to express their skepticism. As much as I like Twitter, this is one of the situations where it fails. You can’t have a conversation about genetics, lab strains versus wild types, etc., in 140 character chunks. At least not very satisfying ones.

So here’s what I decided to do last night. I used Storify to collect the comments of Leonid Kruglyak of Princeton and Michael Eisen of Berkeley, and then passed them on to Will Ratcliff, the lead author of the new study. He then responded. Below you’ll find the Storify tweets, and then Ratcliff’s response. Please continue the conversation in the comment thread. (And be sure to download the paper–it’s open access.)

[View the story "Yeast evolving" on Storify]

Will Ratcliff responds:

Well, I ...

Huffington Post + Science. A New Leaf?

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:26:07 +0000

Today the Huffington Post is launching a new science “channel,” overseen by a full-time science editor. This should be interesting.

The Huffington Post is one of the most popular places for getting news and opinion, attracting well over 30 million views a month. It started out mainly as a blogging network, and then added on a lot of aggregation of news stories, supplemented by slide shows. More recently, they’ve been hiring full-time reporters and editors on subjects like politics and economics.

When it comes to science, this set-up has led to some…well, let’s call it checkered coverage. You could find your way to straight news stories about science from the Associated Press and other outlets, along with some lightly re-written syntheses of articles elsewhere. Some strong voices in the science world paid visits from time to time to share some thoughts. But the Huffington Post has also run some real stinkers in the past–the kind that send readers to the ER with foreheads fractured by particularly powerful desk-slams.

This morning, Arianna Huffington herself introduced the channel with a long post. Here’s its opening:

I’m delighted ...

The Cosmic Performance: My new profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:35:22 +0000

I’ve just written a profile of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, perhaps the best-known scientific figure in America. Here’s how it opens:

On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon has appeared briefly and then slipped below the western horizon, leaving the sky to blinking airplanes rising from La Guardia fifty miles to the south, to satellites gliding in low orbit, to Jupiter and its herd of moons and to the great river of the Milky Way beyond.

The crowd that sits in this chilly field in North Salem, New York, is surrounded by a ring of telescopes. There’s a Dobsonian, a giant barrel-shaped contraption that’s so tall you have to climb a stepladder to look through its eyepiece. Small, squat Newtonian cylinders sit on tripods, rigged to computers that give off a weak lamp-glow from their monitors. A few older men are fussing over the telescopes, but everyone else is ...

2011: A Letter from the Loom

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:19:38 +0000

In 2011, the Loom reached its eighth birthday. Thanks to everyone who’s paid a visit or become a loyal reader in that time. With the year coming to a close, I spent a little time this week perusing the Loom’s archive, reflecting on the things that obsessed me during 2011.

More than many years, this one reminded me just how huge science is. Even if you limited yourself to the most important stories of this past year, there was just too much to keep up with. (Here’s Discover’s top 100 picks.) As a science writer, my focus is biology, but that didn’t ease my year-long case of head-spinning. The anchors that kept me from spinning away completely were the very small and the very complicated.

At the small end of the spectrum were, among other things, the bacteria that call us home. Like every year, 2011 saw outbreaks, such as the E. coli that sickened thousands in Germany. But now that we can read the genomes of these killers, as I noted in Newsweek, we can see how chillingly fast new pathogens can evolve.

But the good germs also ...

The Rise of the E-book: My new essay for Nature

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:24:13 +0000

In this week’s issue of Nature, I write about the revolution that technology is bringing to the world of books. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind a lot recently. I’ve been experimenting with e-books myself, and I’ve been giving some talks about them (I’ll be helping to lead a discussion at Science Online 2012 in January).

My essay is accompanied by this funny picture. The guy looks a lot like me, but, strictly speaking, it should be my wife sitting atop the pile of books, with seagulls for company:

In the summer of 2010, on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, I saw the future of books. I had been invited to teach a writing course at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, a beautiful bulge of rock covered in scrub and herring-gull nests. During a break at the beach with my family, my wife finished reading her book with typical supersonic speed. She craved another, so decided to experiment with her new iPhone.

She tapped the screen. In seconds, an e-book had streamed invisibly through the air into her ...

Melville and microbes: An interview about science writing with Eric Michael Johnson

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:02:41 +0000

Eric Michael Johnson, an historian of science, is also the writer behind an excellent blog, “The Primate Diaries.” The other day he gave me a call to talk about science writing. He put together a two-part Q&A that he published today (part one and part two) that ranges from the science writing in Moby Dick to the microscopic virtues of Twitter. I was particularly flattered to get a portrait done by Nathaniel Gold. Check it out!

Should the new flu stay secret? Or does secrecy kill?

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:50:27 +0000

Recently I blogged about a new strain of potentially dangerous flu that evolved during experiments in the Netherlands and Wisconsin. There I tried to counter the misconception that scientists had intentionally concocted this particular strain. Because these new flus actually evolved pretty quickly in laboratories, we now know we should take seriously the possibility that this transformation may happen in the outside world someday.

But there’s a second issue at play with this new virus: should the world get to see its genome?

As Martin Enserink reported last month, both teams of scientists have submitted their papers for publication. Normally, such a paper might include the entire genome of the new viruses. This was a touchy subject, so the papers went under review by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).

Today, the editors at Science passed on the NSABB’s reccommendations. I’ll quote them here in full:

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) made the following
recommendations regarding the publication of two manuscripts on highly pathogenic avian
influenza A/H5N1:

1. Neither manuscript should be published with complete data and experimental details.

2. Conclusions of the manuscripts ...

Presenting a new ebook: More Brain Cuttings

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:01:34 +0000

Last year I decided to play in the ebook sandbox. I brought together some of my favorite pieces about the brain in an anthology I entitled Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. I teamed up with the publishers George Scott and Charles Nix, and we produced an ebook.

Along the way, we learned a lot. I recounted some of the lessons in this piece for the Atlantic, and others in this conversation with the writer Steve Silberman. Suffice to say, publishing ebooks is by no means a frictionless utopia for writers. Nevertheless it remains strangely addictive. Perhaps we writers get the same jolt of dopamine that readers get when they tap a glass screen and are rewarded with a new book.

It just so happens I now have some new material to keep fueling my addition. I’ve continued to write about the brain, and recently I selected another crop of favorites. This new ebook has made it down the digital assembly line, and is now available for $7.99: More Brain Cuttings: Further Exporations of the Mind (Amazon, Barnes & Noble).

You’ll find a range of subjects here. ...

Science writers: You have great powers.

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 21:54:02 +0000

The news these days is grim for the science-minded. The governor of Texas, who’d also like to be your president, says that Texas schools teach creationism. (They don’t, although Perry–who appointed a creationist to chair the State Board of Education–may wish otherwise.) Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke passionately on HBO about the country’s retreat from dreams.

So I found some small comfort in an email I got from Patrick House, a Stanford graduate student, about my recent post on the cunning ways of the parasite Toxoplasma–Toxo to its friends and admirers.

I’m the first author on the new Toxo paper. I wanted to send you an email that hopefully cheers your day — I’m getting a Ph.D. now in Neuroscience at Stanford, working exclusively on Toxo — and I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.

I did my undergrad work in Philosophy (with some neuroscience thrown in) and was perpetually fascinated by Toxo ever since your Discover article on Parasites a decade ago led me tangentially to it and then — of course — Parasite Rex. I met with Robert, spoke to him about ...

The pleasures of Google+

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 15:16:53 +0000

Over the past week or so, I’ve been playing around with Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter. You can see my posts here.

Whenever a new social media system rolls out, I give it a test-drive. Sometimes I end up in a ditch. Here is my MySpace page, last updated three years ago and now lingering on like a time capsule.

Here is my abandoned Quora page. I asked one question: why does Chewbacca used a crossbow instead of–you know–a laser or something more effective?After I got some answers, I lost all interest.

For the most part, though, I try to make social media part of my life. My rational explanation for this is that, as a writer, I ought to head for the virtual spaces where people congregate and look for things to read. Of course, I’m also lured by the addictive procrastination. It sometimes feels like channel-surfing on a social cable television. Whatever the true cause, I’ve ended up with an author web site (old school!), this blog, a Facebook profile, a Facebook author page, a Twitter account, a Tumblr thing-a-ma-bob, a LinkedIn account…and other things ...

The art of storytelling at the World Science Festival

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:35:29 +0000

The World Science Festival is gearing up for its third year in New York, and I’m delighted to participate once more. This time I’ll be talking about a topic near and dear to my heart–telling stories about science. On Thursday June 2, they’ll have a full day of scientist-writers, television producers, and science writers.

Here’s the lineup (go to the festival site to purchase tickets):

Science on Screen
Thursday, June 2, 2011
(9:00 – 10:00)
Participants: Bill Weir, Louie Psihoyos, Simon Singh, Howard Swartz

Fantastic imagery and groundbreaking journalism dominate the best of documentary science storytelling. Director Louie Psihoyos’ Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (2009) stands as one of the most audacious and dangerous-to-film operations in the history of the conservation movement. NOVA’s Emergency Mine Rescue (2010) chronicled the unprecedented technological feat of rescuing 33 trapped Chilean miners. Today’s best producers of on-screen science are pushing the envelope, using a range of computer-based tools—including the highly cinematic techniques of digital science animation—to take viewers on a swooping ride through previously unseen worlds. How do these newly available techniques influence and enhance their editorial judgment? And what stories of science are ...

A new gig: The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:32:32 +0000

I’m pleased to report that I’ve just been appointed to the board of directors of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. It’s a venerable organization that’s been around for fifty years, dedicated to improving the quality of science news reaching the public. Their programs include the New Horizons in Science briefing, which brings together leading scientists with journalist to talk about cutting-edge research. We’re already scheming about some new ideas to use twenty-first century tools to help science writers–and readers–in new ways. I’ll keep you posted.

Last night’s Cambridge Science Festival science writing video is up

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:42:15 +0000

Here’s the video of last night’s science-writing event at the MIT Museum. Thanks to everyone who made it possible!

Tonight: Live feed from the Cambridge Science Festival

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:16:14 +0000

Today I’m in Cambridge, Mass., to take part in the Cambridge Science Festival. I’ll be speaking with Ed Yong and Hillary Rosner about how blogs, Twitter, and social media are changing science writing. I’ll play the part of the old fogey who remembers the days when modems screeched. The event will be live-streamed here, starting around 7:30 pm. Hope you can join us, virtually!

“Blogger” is not synonymous with “angry child”–An interview on the Consilience podcast

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:54:23 +0000

An interview with me is running on the latest episode of “Consilience,” a podcast on science and skepticism out of South Africa. The conversation, which takes up the second half of the podcast, covers lots of ground. We talked about my new book, A Planet of Viruses, the secret weapons whales use for fighting cancer, and the enduring, tiresome mistake people make of thinking of bloggers as angry children. Check it out.

A note on my ever-expanding social media empire [heh]

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:07:08 +0000

I’ve set up an account at Tumblr. No LOLcats, but assorted images and video that I feel moved to post with little commentary. Renaissance images of the brain, squid eyes, new images of Mercury. That sort of thing.

A question for you: what should I do with my lectures?

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:22:33 +0000

I just got back from San Francisco, where I gave a keynote lecture about how our bodies are like ponds, and why doctors need to think like ecologists. It takes a lot of time for me to put these talks together, and so I like to share them afterwards with more people than those who were physically in the room with me. Sometimes the people who invite me videotape the lectures and put them online. (Example: A talk I gave about science and the media.)

Other times, I make an audio recording and merge it with the slides to create a video. (Example: A talk about Neanderthals.) Still other times, I turn my lecture notes into an essay, illustrated with some of my slides. (Example: a piece on why we get old.) Either way, it takes a fair amount of time and so I want to make sure I’m actually making something people want to watch or read. But it occurred to me that I don’t know audience psychology well enough to know what the best course of action is.

So, if you don’t mind, let me foist this quick little poll on you. I’d really appreciate your answers, ...

Science Home Movies and Technical Ships in a Bottle

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:27:30 +0000

I’ve had a long-running email conversation with Randy Olson, a biologist-turned-film-maker, about what works and what fails when you are trying to convey science to the world at large. In his documentary Flock of Dodos, Randy looked at how creationists made inroads in his home state of Kansas. Randy argued in the movie that evolutionary biologists needed to learn how to do a better job of talking about their work to the public, especially when there’s a well-funded publicity machine operating on the other side. Otherwise, they end up sounding obtuse and high-handed.

Olson makes a similar point in his book, Don’t Be Such A Scientist. In one chapter he takes a close look at how his fellow ocean scientists worked long and hard on a massive report on the state of the oceans (it’s in a bad way), convinced that the sheer poundage of the report would send ripples through the country and lead to concrete actions to deal with the crisis. After the report made its great thunk, nothing of the sort happened. The scientists simply didn’t have any way of ...

How many people are “not everyone”? Some thoughts on scientific debates and smackdowns

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:45:11 +0000

You may have heard about the new paper on how people tend to pick friends who carry a similar gene variant. If true, it would be very cool. But in Nature, Amy Maxmen quotes scientists who don’t like the study at all:

“If this was a study looking for shared genes in patients with diabetes, it would not be up to the standards of the field,” says David Altshuler, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge. “We set these standards after 10 years of seeing so many irreproducible results in gene-association studies.”

Because most genes have modest effects on behaviour or health, many scientists assume that thousands of SNPs — rather than six — need to be analysed before a correlation to any trait can be confidently made. Geneticists are often hard-pressed to find one SNP in a million that reproducibly correlates with a disease, says Altshuler. “It’s like the team bought six lottery tickets and won the megabucks twice — this is not how things work.”

Stanley Nelson, a human geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees, adding: “It certainly is a provocative study — I would have loved to have ...

Math: The Black Diamond Trail of Science Writing (#scio11)

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:07:11 +0000

The comment thread for my post about good writing has turned into a fascinatingly well-focused discussion on writing about math. A mathematician arrived, rending his garments in despair, and now others–both writers and readers–are responding. I’ve always considered math the toughest subject a science writer can tackle, so I find the conversation especially interesting. Check it out.

Death to Obfuscation!

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:35:27 +0000

The latest blizzard socked us pretty hard here in New England. If the streets and runways are clear enough tomorrow, I will be attending a conference called ScienceOnline in North Carolina for the next few days. One of the sessions I’m supposed to moderate is called “Death to Obfuscation.” Ed Yong and I concocted it as a workshop in which we would share our thoughts on good science writing. I’m going to lay out some of my thoughts here in advance, partly to clarify what I’m going to say–Ed and I are a bit nervous that what we thought would be a pretty basic session has exploded into a 60+-person crush, infiltrated by seasoned journalists. And if, on Friday, I’m still stranded here, the whole undertaking won’t have been a complete waste…

Good science writing is some of the most interesting stuff on Earth to read. Bad science writing is the most painful. There are many things that determine whether a piece of science writing is good or bad, but I can sort them into four rough categories: words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. Good science writing demands lots of care ...

The Loom’s Top Ten of 2010

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:14:50 +0000

Happy New Year to one and all. 2010 has been a busy one here, full of tattoos, duck privates, and cannibal Neanderthals. Here are the top posts of the year at the Loom…[P.S.--These are top posts as measured by readership]

1. Kinkiness Beyond Kinky (Why Darwin would have loved the extreme genitals of ducks)

2. Simply Impossible (An uncanny illusion)

3. The X-Woman’s Fingerbone (The Denisovans–the first shoe. Here’s the second)

4. Oh Pepsi, What Hath Thou Wrought? (A science blogging trainwreck that led to the birth of several new blog networks)

5. Linux vs E. coli (Networks in computers and cells)

6. Dawn of the Picasso Fish (A fossil fills in the evolution of flounders)

7. I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords (How the microbiome may control our behavior)

8. Skullcaps and Genomes (The Neanderthal genome turns up in the most unexpected places. Like in Craig Venter)

9. Feathers That Sing (Another example of sexual selections’ creative powers)

10. Of Arsenic and Aliens (which is then followed by this)

Vaporware human evolution update

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:26:35 +0000

I’ve updated my post on the supposed evidence of Homo sapiens in Israel 400,000 years ago. We have a better idea of where this worldwide meme got started, and what the scientist behind the paper thinks about what happened…