(Image: Mayo Clinic) Tracing Diseases to Their Dawns
One of the great milestones of medicine, as I write in my new book She Has Her Mother's Laugh, was the discovery that some diseases are inherited--even when the parents of sick children seem perfectly healthy.

These hereditary diseases, known as recessive disorders, manifest themselves when both copies of a gene carry a disabling mutation. They include cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease. But the most striking of them all is sickle cell anemia. An unusually high number of people in some parts of the world are carriers of the disease, because having a single copy of the sickle cell mutation can actually be good for your health.

As a hereditary disease, sickle cell anemia has a history--or, more accurately, a genealogy. Trace mutations back through the generations far enough, and you'll get to the original copy, which arose in a single person's DNA. In my new column for the New York Times, I write about a new study that may have traced sickle cell anemia to its source--in a child who lived some seven thousand years ago in the Sahara, back when it was watered by rivers and lakes.
  There's This Thing Called the Internet...
Way, way back in 1999, I left the staff of Discover for the life of a freelancer writer. Freelancers at the time pitched editors with clips--photocopies of previous work. It was a huge pain in the neck, and I thought it might be simpler to make a web site where I could post some of my stories. That way, I could just shoot an editor a few links, rather than a packet of snail mail.

To my surprise, web sites soon became essential online hubs for writers. I loaded mine with information on my books as they came out, and added links to past and upcoming talks. Instead of a small clip file, I expanded it to include an archive of my journalism--pushing two decades of articles now.

But over time, it fell out of date. My head shot took on the cast of Dorian Gray. The underlying bones of html grew brittle. And forget about looking at the site on a phone. It was created at a time when that was an absurd idea.

Now, at last, the designers Michelle Lee and Thomas Fondano have rebuilt my web site from the ground up. In addition to information on my books, articles, and talks, I'll also be importing my blog posts onto the site. I hope you like it.
  "An Endlessly Mesmerizing Journey"
Thanks to Maria Konnikova, Brian Hare, and Jennifer Ackerman for their kind words about She Has Her Mother's Laugh, :

“Traversing time and societies, the personal and the political, the moral and the scientific, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh takes readers on an endlessly mesmerizing journey of what it means to be human. Carl Zimmer has created a brilliant canvas of life that is at times hopeful, at times horrifying, and always beautifully rendered. I could hope for no better guide into the complexities, perils, and, ultimately, potential of what the science of heredity has in store for the world.” —Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game and Mastermind

“With his latest work, Zimmer has assured his place as one of the greatest science writers of our time. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is an extraordinary exploration of a topic that is at once familiar and foreign, and touches every one of us. With the eloquence of a poet and the expertise of a scientist Zimmer has created a nonfiction thriller that will change the way you think about your family, those you love, and the past and future.” —Brian Hare, co-author of The Genius of Dogs

“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is at once enlightening and utterly compelling. Carl Zimmer weaves spellbinding narrative with luminous science writing to give us the story of heredity, the story of us all. Anyone interested in where we came from and where we are going—which is to say everyone—will want to read it.”—Jennifer Ackerman, author of Chance in the House of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity
  Book Giveaway Reminder
On Thursday, my publisher will pick five subscribers to "Friday's Elk" to receive a free copy of She Has Her Mother's Laugh. Stay tuned!

You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

The Importance of Clocks
In many branches of science, a good clock can make all the difference. The better we can determine how old things are and when events happened, the better we can put the pieces of history back together. It's important to know that the universe started 13.73 billion years old, for example, and that the Earth is 4.56 billion years old.

There is no one clock to rule them all, though. Each science requires a clock of its own, and some of them require a whole wall of timepieces. For the universe, we have to use old light to tell time. For the Earth, certain radioactive elements like strontium have ticked away accurately since the planet's formation.

Without a good clock, scientists are left to struggle to determine which things came before other things, which are the causes and which the effects, which are the first of their kind and which are late arrivals. The discovery of a good clock can immediately cast some versions of history into the trash, and cause us to take others more seriously. Just such a rethink is now happening in the study of human origins.

Ancient paintings on cave walls are among the most important markers in our history. Whoever painted a lion tens of thousands of years ago--or a series of parallel lines or even the outline of his or her own hand--must have had a mind that could conceive that expressive act, that could generate the desire to travel deep inside a cave to do so.

For all its importance, though, cave art is particularly hard to date. If there’s enough carbon in the paint—from charcoal, for example—you can use radiocarbon dating to determine its age. But some paintings have no carbon to measure. And if that art is old--older than 50,000 years, roughly speaking--the radiocarbon clock becomes useless.

In recent years, scientists have created a different clock for cave art. Sometimes water flows over those paintings, and it gradually deposits lumps or sheets of rock on them—known as flowstones. Those flowstones are laced with tiny levels of uranium—parts per billion. But if you know how to measure those trace amounts, you have yourself a clock, one that will put a minimum age on the paintings underneath.

Some of the paintings in European caves turn out to be very old. So old, in fact, that modern humans could not have painted them. Who did? You can get the whole story in my column this week in the New York Times.
Thanks to Kelly Weinersmith (co-author of the delightful Soonish) for tweeting kindly about my book. Making readers happy is my mission! Just a reminder--subscribers to Friday's Elk will be eligible for a book giveaway on March 15. If you know of friends who might be interested, please forward this email, or let them know they can sign up for Friday's Elk here. 


My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings to New Readers
To those of you just signing up for Friday's Elk, welcome! I generally send this newsletter out each Friday, as the name suggests, but sometimes life gets in the way. You can peruse back issues of the newsletter for free in this archive. There you'll find links to stories I've written, videos of talks I've given, podcasts and radio shows I've spoken on, details on upcoming events, and updates about my next book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, coming out in May. On March 15, my publisher and I will randomly pick five Friday's Elk subscribers to receive free early copies of the book.
  The Future of Biology (And Shrimp on Treadmills)
In January, I gave the plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. I talked about the destructive pressure that politicians are putting on some forms of basic research these days. After the lecture, I sat down with Art Woods and Marty Martin, a pair of biologists who recently launched a new podcast called "Big Biology." (Itunes).

In our chat, we looked ahead at the future of biology--from genomes to cancer biology to the microbiome. We also talked about how biologists can continue to study things that might seem silly to some, but ultimately give us profound insights into how life works. You can listen to the official episode or the full, unedited conversation.

All for now!

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

A Book Giveaway!
Some good news for loyal readers of Friday's Elk: to celebrate the coming publication of She Has Her Mother's Laugh, my publisher is going to give away free copies of the book to five randomly chosen subscribers. We'll make the pick on March 15 and be in touch!

 
England's Lost Roots
In 1903, archaeologists discovered a 10,000-year-old skeleton in a British cave. Found near the village of Cheddar, it came to be known as Cheddar Man. Over a century after its discovery, scientists have figured out how to extract Cheddar Man's entire genome from his bones. Working with Ceylan Yeğinsu, a Times reporter in the London office, I wrote a piece for the New York Times on this study. The big excitement over the research swirls around Cheddar Man's skin, shown here in a reconstruction at the Natural History Museum in London. It's now possible to look at genetic variants and predict people's skin color. And it turns out Cheddar Man was probably dark brown.

This is cool, but it's not terribly surprising. I wrote a few years ago about how the hunter-gatherers who lived in western Europe before the rise of farming had dark skin. Cheddar Man turns out to have belonged to those people--and so he had the same pigmentation. What is most intriguing is that Cheddar Man has very little kinship with living Brits, thanks to two later waves of immigrants that swamped his island home. (I write in more detail about the complexity of skin color's history in She Has Her Mother's Laugh.)
 
People Love The Mutant Crayfish
It's always a pleasure to discover other people share my odd obsessions. My story last week about a new species of all-female crayfish clones seems to have struck a note. I got tons of queries on Twitter and Facebook about how they taste. (I haven't eaten them myself, but they're getting cooked up in Madagascar since their spread there from Germany.) The story also climbed the charts at the Times, and even earned a "short imagined monologue" in McSweeney's: "I'm Just a Misunderstood Marbled Crayfish (Overlord) Who Is Certainly Not Planning World Domination." Meanwhile, species expert Jerry Coyne questions whether the new species is a new species at all--mainly because our concepts of species are blunt instruments.
  Hello Rochester!
On Thursday, February 15, I'll be in Rochester, New York, to give a public talk. It's called "A Voyage to the Center of the Brain." Details here



My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings! Here are some things I've been up to...

  Charles Darwin warned that studying the origin of species wouldn't be easy. When we look around at distinct species alive today, we're looking at the tips of evolutionary branches that reach back thousands or millions of years. But sometimes scientists catch a break. Today in the New York Times, I write about a species of crayfish that leaped into existence thanks to a single mutation about 25 years ago. And ever since, it's been spreading like wildfire.

Can Famines Reprogram People For Life?
The Netherlands suffered through a six-month famine during World War II. Ever since, researchers have been studying the shadow it has cast over Dutch people's health. Some studies suggest that the children of women who were pregnant during the Hunger Winter have experienced a greater risk for a range of problems, both psychological and physical, throughout their lives. Here's a piece I wrote about a new study on the way that epigenetics may have played a role in that long-lasting effect.

The Genes Inside You--And Around You
Genes can influence our lives in many ways--including how long we stay in school. But when scientists discover a gene that can add or subtract a few weeks to that total time, they have to be careful. It's possible that the gene doesn't have any influence on how children do in school or at their homework. Instead, they may simply share a gene with their parents--a gene that influences how those parents build an environment that can influence how long children stay in school. While working on my story about a new study that documented this effect, I found that psychologists were very excited by the results--while biologists and animal breeding experts had a sense of deja vu. They've known about this phenomenon--which they call indirect genetic effects--for decades. I wonder how many other concepts have yet to take the leap over the barriers separating scientific disciplines?
  Four Months Left Till Pub Day!
May 29--the publication date for She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity--is not that far away. I'll have more news to share in the next four months, including a book giveaway. In the meantime--here's a fresh batch of nice words people have to say about the book...

“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is at once far-ranging, imaginative, and totally relevant. Carl Zimmer makes the complex science of heredity read like a novel, and explains why the subject has been–and always will be–so vexed.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker staff writer and author of Pulitzer Prize winner The Sixth Extinction

“One of the most gifted science journalists of his generation, Carl Zimmer tells a gripping human story about heredity from misguided notions that have caused terrible harm to recent ongoing research that promises to unleash more powerful technologies than the world has ever known. The breadth of his perspective is extraordinarily compelling, compassionate, and valuable. Please read this book now.” —Jennifer Doudna, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley, co-author of A Crack in Creation

“Zimmer is a born story-teller. Or is he an inherited story-teller? The inspiring and heartbreaking stories in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh build a fundamentally new perspective on what previous generations have delivered to us, and what we can pass along. An outstanding book and great accomplishment.”—Daniel Levitin, McGill University, author of The Organized Mind and This is Your Brain on Music

“With this book, Carl Zimmer rises from being our best biological science writer to being one of our very best non-fiction writers in any field, period.”—Kevin Padian, professor of Integrative Biology and curator of Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley

“Nobody writes about science better than Carl Zimmer. As entertaining as he is informative, he has a way of turning the discoveries of science into deeply moving human stories. This book is a timely account of the uses and misuses of some of the science that directly impact our lives today. It is also a career moment by one of our most important and graceful writers. Here is a book to be savored.”—Neil Shubin, University of Chicago, author of Your Inner Fish

"In this beautifully written, heartfelt and enjoyable masterpiece, Zimmer weaves together history, autobiography and science to elucidate the mysteries of heredity and why we should care. I couldn't put this book down, and can’t recommend it too highly." Daniel E. Lieberman, Harvard University, author of The Story of the Human Body
  Upcoming Talks
February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. "A Voyage to the Center of the Brain."

(More to come!)

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

Some muskoxen weigh over a thousand pounds. They're hard animals to miss--that is, if you've hopped in a snow machine and traveled across an Arctic tundra for a few hours in search of a herd. But to understand muskoxen there's no alternative but to be where they live. You can't Google-Earth your way to insight.

This week in the New York Times, I wrote about Joel Berger, a biologist who has spent a lot of time looking at muskoxen over the past decade. Berger's research has revealed a worrying vulnerability in these polar giants. Climate change may starve pregnant muskoxen mothers. You can read the whole story here.

Of course, Western scientists are not the only people who have spend time observing muskoxen and other animals of the Arctic. Berger has also been integrating the knowledge and language of the Inupiat people who live in Alaska into his own understanding of muskoxen and their environment. In the thousands of years they've lived in the Arctic, the Inupiat and other indigenous peoples have seen a lot--including huge ice tsunamis that might also pose a threat to animals like muskoxen. Maddie Stone at Earther and Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic both report on that aspect of the work.
  Upcoming Talks
February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. "A Voyage to the Center of the Brain."


My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

This week I went to Minneapolis to speak about science writing at a conference at the University of Minnesota. I wanted to mention one of my favorite novels in the talk, Moby-Dick. My view of Melville's book has evolved from my days as a college English major to my current existence as a science writer. I've grown increasingly fond of the "cetology" chapters, in which Melville veers away from the story of Ishmael to explore the biology of whales. In 2013, I was asked by the Los Angeles Public Library to write an essay on the subject for an online celebration of the novel. I wanted to put a link to the essay on a slide for my Minnesota talk, but I discovered that the whole site for the project had disappeared. Such is the tenuous legacy of writers in the digital age. So I fished the piece out of my hard drive and revived it on Medium. You can read it here.

As for fresh writing, I've published my first three New York Times columns of 2018 since my last email.

The first one is about fiber. We always hear that dietary fiber is good for us, but scientists are still figuring out why. We don't get direct benefits, because we can't digest it. But our microbes can--and it may fuel their good works in our bodies.

The second column is about one of the great human migrations: the arrival of people in the Americas. Three years ago I wrote about the remains of an 11,500-year-old infant found in Alaska, from which scientists succeeded in extracting bits of DNA. Now another team has managed to get the whole genome out. They've discovered that this infant girl belonged to a previously unknown, early-branching population of Native Americans. Her genome provides a lot of new clues about the Asian roots of Native Americans, and how they branched into different lineages as they moved into the Americas.

On Wednesday, I published my latest column on lakes and rivers in a greenhouse world. As we put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, some of it is getting into inland waters. It may alter the chemistry of some lakes and rivers, in a way that may seriously alter freshwater life. As I tried to convey in the column, this is a pretty new field of research, and so there are a lot more questions than answers at this point.

Finally, I'm happy to report that a couple more writers have had nice things to say about She Has Her Mother's Laugh:

“Carl Zimmer is not only among my favorite science writers—he’s also now responsible for making me wonder why there is more Neanderthal DNA on earth right now than when Neanderthals were here, and why humanity is getting taller and smarter in the last few generations. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh explains how our emerging understanding of genetics is touching almost every part of society, and will increasingly touch our lives.” —Charles Duhigg, author of Smarter Faster Better and The Power of Habit

"Carl Zimmer lifts off the lid, dumps out the contents, and sorts through the pieces of one of history’s most problematic ideas: heredity. Deftly touching on psychology, genetics, race, and politics, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is a superb guide to a subject that is only becoming more important. Along the way, it explains some remarkably complicated science with equally remarkable clarity–a totally impressive job all around.” —Charles C. Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

We're now less than five months away from publication! Pre-order your copy here.
  Upcoming Talks

January 18, 2018 Guilford CT: Guilford Free Library. "Can We Edit Life? Should We?" Details here.

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. "A Voyage to the Center of the Brain."

More to come--stay tuned!
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

At the close of 2017, I just wanted to thank all of you for reading "Friday's Elk" through the year. One of the joys of this job is learning more about the world. Another one is sharing that joy.

To round out the year, here's a feature I published this past week in the New York Times about the mysteries of proteins.

The genesis of the story goes back seven years ago, to a podcast I recorded with a biologist named David Baker. He explained to me just how hard it was for scientists to figure out the rules by which proteins fold into their final shapes. Protein scientists simply call this challenge "the folding problem."

A couple months ago, I had the chance to meet Baker in person and hear him deliver a lecture about what he and his colleagues have been up to in the past few years. To my surprise, they had figured out so much about the folding problem that they were making designer proteins from scratch to do things ranging from fighting the flu to detecting trace amount of illegal drugs. If my story leaves you intrigued, you can join the effort by letting Baker take over your computer or your Android phone.

This year has been full of remarkable science that I've had the privilege to report on--from giant penguins to telescope-like scallop eyes, ancient African genomes, healing seagrass beds, the oldest known fossil of our species, dinosaur-age gliding mammals, deer-killing proteins, embryo-like organisms, risky gene drives, and our endangered primate cousins. And then there were really strange assignments, like writing about rumors of sonic rifles in Cuba. (One highlight of the year for me was a prize for some work I did in 2016: an Online Journalism Award for my Game of Genomes series at Stat.)

The talks I gave in 2017 spanned the range from science to politics (a range that's a lot narrower than some people may have realized till recently). On "The Daily," the excellent news podcast from the New York Times, I talked about advances in gene editing. In March I gave a lecture about what lurks inside our genomes. In June I chatted at the Aspen Ideas Festival with fellow science writer Ed Yong about our shared obsessions about subjects such as Neanderthals and neuroscience. In 2017, I also talked about the state of science in the Trump era. In September, I offered a warning from the past about the threats science can face. And in October I talked about reporting on science in an age of fake news.

As for 2018, I can offer a few promises.

1. For starters, I will be giving more talks that I hope you can come to. I'll add them to this newsletter's running list as they get locked in.

2. In 2017, I ran a series of talks at Caveat in New York about the nature of life. It was a blast to interview a philosopher, a chemist, a synthetic biologist, and others in front of a live audience about the Big Question. If all goes according to plan, the recordings of those talks will get released as a podcast series in early 2018.

3. There will be a book! At the start of 2017, I wasn't 100% sure there would be one--or at the very least I knew I had a scary amount of work left to do on it. But at the end of the year, I have proof that it's a thing. She Has Her Mother's Laugh will be out in the spring, but you can pre-order a copy now.
Upcoming Talks
January 3, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture: "Science and Scandal: Reporting on Biology In An Age of Controversy."

NEW! January 18, 2018 Guilford CT: Can We Edit Life? Should We? Details here.

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Autographed Books!
I have a couple shelves of my books I need to clear out. You have to buy holiday gifts. We need to talk!

If you'd like to get an autographed copy of one of my books, please check out the Amazon links below. They're all in good or like-new condition.

Amazon's gotten a little buggy when it comes to presenting used books, but these links should take you to a collectible offer marked "Carl Zimmer--Author." First come, first serve!

Evolution: Making Sense of Life (First edition, hardback)

Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea (Look for the offer from "Carl Zimmer--Author")

Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life (British hardcover edition)

Parasite Rex (British paperback edition)

A Planet of Viruses (Hardback first edition)

Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed

Soul Made Flesh (American paperback edition)

Soul Made Flesh (American hardback edition)

​Soul Made Flesh (British paperback edition)

The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (First edition, hardback)

The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution (Second edition, paperback)

If you have any trouble ordering these items, let me know.

  Giant Penguins and Information Injections
Here are my two most recent New York Times columns for your reading pleasure.

First up: scientists have figured out how to "inject" information directly into the brains of monkeys. This Matrix-like experiment hints at a way to use implants to help people with strokes.

Second up: giant penguins once roamed the southern oceans. I mean, GIANT. Why are they gone?

  What Is Life? The Final Night!
Last week at Caveat in New York, a great crowd came out to hear Jeremy England of MIT talk about how irreversible physics can lead to life and life-like things. And then I spoke to Steven Benner of the Foundation for Molecular Evolution about how weird life might get elsewhere in the universe. (Horta!)

Next week, on Wednesday December 20, I'll be hosting the final night of the "What Is Life?" series. After wondering what life is and how it began, we are now going to take a look at life in its infancy.

Donato Giovennelli of Rutgers will talk about traveling to Earth's remote corners to get hints about what life looked like four billion years ago. And then we'll talk with Kate Adamala of the University of Minnesota about studying the earliest life forms by trying to make them.

Doors open at 7:30 and the fun starts at 8. You can get tickets here (or at the door).

(And congratulations to the folks at Caveat for this delightful review in The New Yorker!)


  She Has Her Mother's Laugh Featured in Publisher's Weekly
I was thrilled that Publishers Weekly picked my forthcoming book as one of next year's "books people are going to be talking about." She Has Her Mother's Laugh will be out in the spring, but you can pre-order a copy now.

  Upcoming Talks

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture: "Science and Scandal: Reporting on Biology In An Age of Controversy."

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings. I hope all American readers had a happy Thanksgiving. A sudden arrival of stuffing and turkey slowed down my email newsletter production, and so I have a bit to catch up on here.

First off, the columns.

While working on She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I got obsessed with the germ line. The nineteenth-century biologist August Weismann argued that what joined each generation to the next was an unbroken lineage of cells, carrying some mysterious hereditary factors. He traced the germ line through the cells that gave rise to eggs and sperm, then on to the cells in new embryos, and then still further on to their own eggs and sperm. The germ line, Weismann said, was effectively immortal.

But modern molecular biology raises a profound question about the germ line. We know that cells accumulate damage to their proteins over time and pass it down to their daughter cells. That accumulating cellular damage is an important part of why we get old. If the germ line lives beyond us, shouldn't it become vastly more damaged?

On November 22, I wrote a column about a new study on the germ line's immortality. In an experiment on worms, researchers found evidence that eggs carry out a burst of cellular house-keeping before they become new embryos. Check it out.

This past Thursday I changed gears to an entirely different topic: the remarkable structure of eyes. In particular, I wrote about scallop eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if you dind't know scallops had eyes; I didn't either till I started writing about the evolution of vision. But, indeed, those delicious scallops grow hundreds of eyes.

These visual organs are so delicate and intricate that their function has largely escaped understanding until now. For my column, I wrote about what the latest generation of microscopes is revealing about scallop eyes. It turns out they work a lot like the radio telescopes we use to observe distant galaxies. I kid you not.

Earlier this week, Setsen Altan-Ochir published a story about a recent Q & A I did in San Francisco with Joe DiRisi, a biologist who is hunting for diseases by isolated fragments of DNA in people's bodies. In 2014, I wrote in the New York Times about DiRisi's first high-profile success with this method, identifying the bacteria threatening a boy's life. As Altan-Ochir reports, he's made major advances since then, which might help bring us to a day when doctors can diagnose diseases in a matter of a few hours by uploading DNA sequences to the cloud.

Also, a little reminder for New York-area readers: I'll be hosting my next evening in the series, "What is Life?" on Wednesday, December 6. The theme will be, "Is Life Inevitable?"

I'll be talking to Jeremy England, an MIT physicist who sees life as stitched into the physical laws of the cosmos. Then I'll be talking to Steven Benner, a leading expert on the origin of life, who will tell us about all the weird forms life might take elsewhere in the universe.

The evening will take place at Caveat, in lower Manhattan, at 7:30 pm on December 6. You can get a ticket here.

Finally, here are a few stories from this week that I enjoyed and wanted to share:

*It’s been 15 years since SARS came out of nowhere, killed almost 800 people, and vanished. Now scientists have found close cousins of the virus in a Chinese bat cave. David Cyranoski has the story for Nature.

*Scott Waldman, writing for E & E News, reports on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's drive for a "red-team blue-team" debate over climate change. This isn't actually how science works. For a reality check, here is a 2014 report from the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society on our understanding of climate change. And here is a new report from the U.S. federal government's scientists.

*Magie Koerth-Baker writes an epic tale of panda sex for FiveThirtyEight. I have nothing else to add. Just read it.


  Upcoming Talks

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture: Science and Scandal: Reporting on Biology In An Age of Controversy

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Three years ago I wrote about a provocative new idea for the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. Maybe conservation biologists could wipe out invasive species with a fast-spreading gene.

One of the key thinkers behind that idea was a biologist named Kevin Esvelt. Recently Esvelt did something remarkable: he got in touch with me to let me know he now thinks that the idea is a bad one. Maybe even a dangerous one. This week, I wrote about Esvelt's change of heart in my column for the New York Times.

If this drama intrigues you, you can find a lot more where that came from in my book She Has Her Mother's Laugh, which is coming out in May. CRISPR is so powerful that it forces us to think hard about what about heredity matters to us, and why it exactly it does so.

I'm done with the proofreading for the book, and now I'm starting to get it in front of some early readers. Two personal writer-heroes of mine have kind things to say about it:

David Grann, New Yorker staff writer and author most recently of Killers of the Flower Moon, says, “No one unravels the mysteries of science as brilliantly and compellingly as Carl Zimmer, and he has proven it again with She Has Her Mother’s Laugh-—a sweeping, magisterial book that illuminates the very nature of who we are.”

And here's Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford physiologist whose latest book is Behave: “Humans have long noticed something remarkable, namely that organisms are similar but not identical to their parents—in other words, that some traits can be inherited. From this observation has grown the elegant science of genetics, with its dazzling medical breakthroughs. And from this has also grown the toxic pseudosciences of eugenics, Lysenkoism and Nazi racial ideology. Carl Zimmer traces the intertwined histories of the science and pseudoscience of heredity. Zimmer writes like a dream, teaches a ton of accessible science, and provides the often intensely moving stories of the people whose lives have been saved or destroyed by this topic. I loved this book.”

(In the last issue of Friday's Elk, I used a bad link for pre-orders. You can pre-order the book here.)

In other news: I'll be hosting my next evening in the series, "What is Life?" on December 6. The question we'll explore will be, "Is Life Inevitable?" I'll be talking to Jeremy England, an MIT physicist who sees life as stitched into the physical laws of the cosmos. Then I'll be talking to Steven Benner, a leading expert on the origin of life, who will tell us about all the weird forms life might take elsewhere in the universe.

The conversations will take place at Caveat, in lower Manhattan, at 7:30 pm on December 6. You can get a ticket here.


  Upcoming Talks

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

I'm in the middle of proofreading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, which has slowed me down on other fronts. But it's a pleasure to see the book continue its odyssey towards publication in May. (Reminder: you can pre-order it now!)

I've got a few talks coming up in the next few weeks, but there's one I want especially to draw your attention to. One week from tonight, I'll be in New York for the second night in my "What is Life?" series.

On November 1 at Caveat, you can join me for conversations with a pair of leading scientists about how life began--about the wild history of research into life's origins, and the current debates about how it got started some 4 billion years ago. The first night of the series, in front of a sold-out house, was a blast, so I'm very excited about the next one. You can find information about the event and tickets here.

  Upcoming Talks
October 27, San Francisco. The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses. Details. SOLD OUT.

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life? Night 2; How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. "The Philosophical Virus." The Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture:

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Final night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings! It's been a pretty busy week.

Last Saturday night, the Online News Association held their annual award ceremony in Washington. My "Game of Genomes" series for Stat won an award for explanatory reporting.

I couldn't be there to accept it, but if I had been, I would have done so on behalf of the talented team who turned my obsession into a stylish piece of online journalism: my editor Jason Ukman; Stat's multimedia guru Jeff Delviscio; Alissa Ambrose for visual editing; Molly Ferguson for the delightful illustrations; Dom Smith for the smart animations; the web masters Corey Taylor, Ryan DeBeasi, and Jim Reevior; Tony Guzman, the project manager; copy editor Sarah Mupo; and Stat's fearless leader, Rick Berke.

On Thursday, I went to Stony Brook University to give a lecture entitled "Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News." Bat Boy figured prominently in it. The talk was recorded, and you can watch it here.

Also on Thursday, I reported for the New York Times about a surprising new study on how skin gets its color. An investigation of the genes behind light and dark skin reveals how variants for different colors were present in our pre-human ancestors--and are now spread around the world.

Finally, if you live in San Francisco (or are coming to this year's World Conference of Science Journalists in that fine city), I hope you can join me at the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses on October 27. Here's how the organizers describe it:

The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAH!) is a celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory. Six brave speakers will present their bad theories in front of a live audience and a panel of judges with real science credentials, who together will determine which speaker takes home the coveted sculpture of Darwin shrugging skeptically. And eternal glory, of course.

Adam Savage, former Mythbuster, will give the keynote. The evening will be hosted by Dr. Kelly Weinersmith. I'll be one of the judges, along with Maggie Koerth-Baker (senior science writer, FiveThirtyEight), ecologist Gail Patricelli, and astrophysicist Katie Mack.

You can order tickets here.
  Upcoming Talks
October 20: New York: Imagine Science Film Festival Closing Night. Details.

October 27, San Francisco. The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses. Details.

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. "The Philosophical Virus." The Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture:

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

As regular readers of Friday's Elk know, I've been chugging away for a couple years now on a book about heredity--its history and its future, what scientists have discovered about it and what it means to us all.

At last, I can share with you the cover of She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become. I wish I could say that this lovely image was my idea. But the jacket design is the work of Pete Garceau, and the art was created by Sandra Culliton.

The book will arrive in bookstores May 29, 2018. But already my publisher is getting some endorsements. Ed Yong, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of I Contain Multitudes, has this to say:

"She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a masterpiece--a career-best work from one of the world's premier science writers, on a topic that literally touches every person on the planet."

Even though the official publication date is months away, you can pre-order the book now. And I hope you do! Pre-ordering, you may be surprised to learn, is a huge boon to authors these days. It helps make a book more prominent on book-selling web sites, which in turn helps bring it to the attention of radio producers, reviewers, and others who can help spread the word even more.

So I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd help build the momentum. Take your pick from these links (and share them with your friends!): Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, or iBooks.

I was inspired to write this book because heredity is at once so familiar and so alien. It is something we all know about, and yet it also manages to keep us perpetually perplexed. What do we inherit from our ancestors, exactly? How does life's past shape its present? DNA is an important part of the answer, but we can't stop there. If we do, we fall prey to all sorts of fallacies. For example, it can come as a surprise to learn that if you go back nine or ten generations, you can find many ancestors from whom you inherit no DNA at all.

In She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I explore the history of this intimately mysterious concept--the shifting explanations as to why like engenders like. I trace the origins of our modern concept of heredity through long-running obsessions with breeding crops and livestock, with defining races of people to be persecuted and even enslaved, with searching for the causes of medical disorders that arise from within. I look at how twenty-first-century studies of genomes have shed light on the astonishing complexity by which heredity influences traits ranging from height to intelligence. And I show how genetic explorations of our ancestry challenge simplistic notions of our inherited identity.

In the book, I consider how we can expand our notion of heredity. It takes place not just betweeen generations, but within our own bodies as well. You can trace a genealogy of the cells in your brain, for example. I also examine controversial arguments that heredity can take place beyond genes, carried across the generations through other channels such as culture or even microbes. A broader understanding of heredity is vital for us to grapple with our new found power--thanks to tools like CRISPR--to alter heredity itself: to steer it on new courses or simply break its familiar rules.

I'll have more news about the book in future issues of Friday's Elk.

Meanwhile...I published a couple things this week in the New York Times.

First up is a column about one especially weird form of heredity: ancient viruses. A surprising amount of our genome is made up of DNA from viruses that infected our ancestors millions of years ago. We've inherited their genes ever since. A series of new studies have provided new clues to how important they are for our health--even for our survival as embryos.

The Times also asked me to investigate the strange row between the U.S. and Cuba, sparked by a mysterious outbreak of nausea and other symptoms in American diplomats. The idea that the diplomats are being attacked with a sonic weapon has gained a lot of currency. But acoustics researchers I talked to found that notion unlikely. In the Friday paper, my article on sonic weapons appeared, plus a "Times Insider" piece on what it's like to wade into international disputes as a science writer.

This week, Medscape posted a video interview I had with Eric Topol about becoming a science writer, reporting on genomics, and contending with genetic tests that assure me I'm a bald warrior.

And, finally, on Thursday, October 12, I'll be speaking at Stony Brook, giving the first AAAS Kavli Lecture. My talk is called "Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News." It will be livestreamed, too: details here.

  Upcoming Talks
October 12, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture. Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News.

October 20: New York: Imagine Science Film Festival Closing Night. Details.

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

In the field of ancient DNA, scientists keep doing the impossible. The very idea of reading genes from organisms that died thousands of years ago once seemed absurd. Then it became fairly commonplace. Still, some kinds of old DNA seemed off limits. The only place scientists could hope to find it was cold places where the molecule had a chance of surviving for millennia. Finding ancient DNA in a place like Africa seemed a fool's errand.

Scientists are crashing through that barrier, too. A place like Africa may not be as cold as Alaska. But it does include sites--high-altitude caves, for example--where some DNA can survive. And new, sensitive tests can detect DNA in samples that would have seemed gene-free a few years ago.

This week in the New York Times, I wrote about a new study on 16 samples of ancient DNA from human remains, ranging in age up to 8,000 years old. The new results complement archaeological research, showing how populations have migrated across Africa, sometimes overrunning each other, sometimes merging together. Check it out.


  Upcoming Talks

October 4, Boston, Festival of Genomics. "Game of Genomes: How the Public Can Learn About Genomics Through about Their Own Genomes." A panel discussion with some of the scientists who helped me with my series for Stat.

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture. Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News.

October 20: New York: Imagine Science Film Festival Closing Night. Details.

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

This week I asked my editor at the New York Times if I needed to make a disclosure of possible conflict of interest. The trouble is that I have a tapeworm named after me: Acanthobothrium zimmeri.

The reason for the question was the topic of my column: the dire threat that parasites now face. A massive study of parasites around the world shows that climate change could drive as many as 1 in 3 species extinct. I worry that Acanthobothrium zimmeri, which infects a tropical skate, will wink out of existence. My editor didn't see the need for a disclosure. But I figured that you, dear reader, should know.

On a separate note, the video of my recent talk about science, journalism, and democracy, is now posted on YouTube.

I've got more talks coming up, listed below--including a couple new additions: I'll be talking on the closing night of the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York on October 20, and I'll be speaking in Rochester NY in February.


  Upcoming Talks

October 4, Boston, Festival of Genomics. "Game of Genomes: How the Public Can Learn About Genomics Through about Their Own Genomes." A panel discussion with some of the scientists who helped me with my series for Stat.

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture. Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News.

NEW: October 20: New York: Imagine Science Film Festival Closing Night. Details.

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

NEW: February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

It was a sold-out night on Wednesday at Caveat, the new New York science-themed venue that's hosting my live series, "What is Life?" this fall.

I talked to a philosopher and an astrobiologist about how they define life, bringing out some props to figure out where they stand, life-wise: some lichen from my yard, a wind-up toy, a vial of viruses, and a rusty nail.

Sara Imari Walker of Arizona State University (in the photo) told the audience that I was talking about life as a thing, whereas she thought of it as a process. I took an applause-based survey, and discovered that they agreed.

The next Caveat conversation will be on November 1. The question of the night will be, How did life start?

Earlier on Wednesday, I gave the keynote talk at a meeting at Rockefeller University called "Science, Democracy, and Journalism." I explored a disastrous episode in the history of science, when the Soviet Union turned away from biology and persecuted geneticists. I found some disturbing parallels to the state of science in the United States today. I posted the text of my speech on Medium, with links and sources.

  Upcoming Talks
October 4, Boston, Festival of Genomics. "Game of Genomes: How the Public Can Learn About Genomics Through about Their Own Genomes." A panel discussion with some of the scientists who helped me with my series for Stat.

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture.

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details here.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

NEW: February 15, 2018: Rochester, NY: Neilly Lecture Series, River Campus Libraries. 
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Last week I let you know about my upcoming series of talks about life. Here's an update with the details of the full schedule. All four events will take place at Caveat in Manhattan:

9/6 I'll kick off the series with the fundamental question, "What is life?" First I'll talk to a philosopher, Carlos Mariscal, about why this question is so hard to answer--perhaps because the question itself doesn't make sense. Then I'll speak with Sara Imari Walker, a physicist and astrobiologist, about how she answers the question as part of the search for extraterrestrial life.

11/1 How did life start? Geochemist H James Cleaves II and I will talk about the century-long struggle to answer that question. I'll then talk with astrobiologist Caleb Scharf about where that struggle has left us today, and where it's headed.

12/6 Is life inevitable? MIT physicist Jeremy England and I talk about his theory about how life emerges out of physics. I then ask biologist Steven Benner about whether life has to be the way it is on Earth, or if it can exist in weird forms we can barely imagine.

12/20 What did the first life look like? Microbial ecologist Donato Giovonelli and I will talk about his travels to the extreme places on Earth that may be the best models for where the earliest life existed. Finally, I'll talk to Kate Adamala about how she studies the first life forms--by trying to create them from scratch.
  The Seasons of the Microbiome
In 2010, I wrote my first article for the New York Times about the human microbiome. In the seven years since, research on our bacterial ecosystem has taken off. It's now becoming clear that there is no such thing as "the" human microbiome. There are many of them, and they're different from place to place. If you are a suburban American, for example, you have a microbiome that's shaped by your existence--the refined foods you eat, the antibiotics you take for infections, the antibacterial soap you use to wash your hands, and so on. If you're a hunter-gatherer, you have a microbiome shaped by your very different life.

Researchers are now gaining an understanding of the many human microbiomes. In my column this week for the New York Times, I report on research on the Hadza, a small group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. The work is revealing all sorts of surprises, including a microbiome that cycles with the seasons. (Photo by Jeff Leach.)
  Award News
This week the finalists were announced for the Online Journalism Awards. I'm delighted that my series for Stat, "Game of Genomes" is a finalist for explanatory journalism.

  Upcoming Talks
September 6, New York, "What Is Life?" Details here.

September 6, New York, Rockefeller University. "Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling with a New Reality." I'll be giving the keynote lecture for this day-long meeting. You can watch in person or via livestream. Details here.

October 4, Boston, Festival of Genomics. "Game of Genomes: How the Public Can Learn About Genomics Through about Their Own Genomes." A panel discussion with some of the scientists who helped me with my series for Stat.

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details here.

November 1, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?

November 8, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

December 6, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?

December 20, New York. "What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

I'm excited to let you know about a series of live events I'll be presenting this fall in New York.

It's called, simply, "What is Life?" I'll be talking on stage, one-on-one, with scientists and philosophers about this fundamental question. We're going to explore the latest insights science has provided us about how life began, how to find it on other planets, and how to think about it.

The events will take place at Caveat, a new Manhattan science-focused venue (complete with food and drink). The first one will be on September 6 at 8 pm. I'll speak first to Carlos Mariscal, a philosopher from the University of Nevada, and then to Sara Imari Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University.

To get more information and tickets, go here. Please share the link to anyone who you think might want to come.

There will be three more evenings in the series over the course of the next few months--I'll send out those details soon.
  How Many Kinds of Cells Do We Have?
It's a simple question--with no good answer. For my column this week in the New York Times, I explore the quest to find one. Scientists are having some success figuring out how many kinds of cells are in a tiny worm. Scaling up to our 37-trillion-cell bodies is going to be a challenge, though.

  Upcoming Talks
NEW: September 6, New York, "What Is Life?" Details here.

September 6, New York, Rockefeller University. "Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling with a New Reality." I'll be giving the keynote lecture for this day-long meeting. You can watch in person or via livestream. Details here.

October 4, Boston, Festival of Genomics. "Game of Genomes: How the Public Can Learn About Genomics Through about Their Own Genomes." A panel discussion with some of the scientists who helped me with my series for Stat.

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details here.

November 15, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings! I'm back from my break and putting the finishing touches on my heredity book. This is the anxious stage when I have to try to artfully slip late-breaking news--such CRISPR-edited human embryos (shown above)--into the manuscript. Everyone who writes a book about science silently wishes that scientists would halt all their relevant research once the book goes to the printer. After the book has safely made it to the paperback edition stage, I think it would be okay for the research to start again...

Speaking of CRISPR, I talked this week to Michael Barbaro of "The Daily," the New York Times podcast. In a week dominated by talk of nuclear war, I was grateful to get a chance to chat about biology. Here's the episode. My portion starts around 7:00.

For my first post-break "Matter" column for the New York Times, I write about some beautiful new fossils that tell us something new about the history of mammals. In the Age of Dinosaurs, a number of them glided overhead.

Also, I'm going to be giving a lot of talks this fall--in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere. I've added some new entries below, and I have a few more to pass along once they get officially locked down. Stay tuned.
  Upcoming Talks
NEW: September 6, New York, Rockefeller University. "Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling with a New Reality." I'll be giving the keynote lecture for this day-long meeting. You can watch in person or via livestream. Details here.

NEW: October 4, Boston, Festival of Genomics. "Game of Genomes: How the Public Can Learn About Genomics Through about Their Own Genomes." A panel discussion with some of the scientists who helped me with my series for Stat.

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture

October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions. Details here.

November 15, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings! I'm taking a summer break, but I wanted to let you know about a couple of new pieces of audio for your listening pleasure.

--This week, I spoke with BBC World Service's show, "The Inquiry." The title of this week's episode is, "Is Gene Editing Out of Control?" I told the story of how we got to the point where we can even ask that question.

--At last month's Aspen Idea Festival, fellow science writer Ed Yong and I had a lively conversation in front of a live audience about the many ways science undermines our notion of ourselves as individuals. We roved over new discoveries about the human genome, microbiomes, and brains. You can listen to the hour-long recording here.
  Good Stuff
A podcast history of how twenty women tried to reach the North Pole.

Scientists have now discovered a grand total of four Denisovans.

How CRISPR may save island birds from their invasive enemies.

  Upcoming Talks
October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture

November 15, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

A number of people just signed up this week for Friday's Elk--I'm guessing after seeing a link to it in my Reddit Ask-Me-Anything session on Tuesday. Welcome!

Just so you know, I use this email to keep interested folks up to date with my writing and talks. And, taking a page from science writer Ed Yong (who puts out a superb email newsletter), I'm going to start sharing the science-related things I'm consuming--articles, podcasts, etc.--that I consider particularly link-worthy.
  The Ultimate Parasite
Parasites are a thing for me. In Parasite Rex, I sang the praises of creatures like tapeworms. (One of my career highlights is lending my name to the tapeworm Acanthrobothrium zimmeri.) I've explored the exquisite stripped-down cunning of viruses in A Planet of Viruses. I have defended the reputation of parasites on Radiolab. But this week was the first time I reported on what is perhaps the ultimate parasite: deformed proteins called prions.

Prions replicate by forcing normal proteins to bend into their own disease-causing shape. On Tuesday, I wrote a story in the New York Times about a raging epidemic of prions that's spread across much of the United States over the past fifty years. Aside from hunters, most people aren't familiar with it. That's because chronic wasting disease attacks only deer and elk. For now, there's no clear evidence of people getting sick from eating prion-laced meat from these animals. But that's no reason not to be concerned. One expert told me he sees only one promising way to slow down the outbreak: fire. (You could say, "Kill it with fire," except that the prion was never really alive to begin with.)
  The Gene That Makes Men Live Longer
To understand why we get old, scientists have been searching for genetic variations that are more common in long-lived people. It's been a hard search, but in recent years scientists have had a few successes. I wrote earlier this month in the Times about a variant in the gene for the receptor for growth hormone that appears to extend people's lives by a decade. For some reason, though, the effect only works on men. The study raises a lot more questions than it answers, so don't expect an army of immortal men any time soon. Here's my story.
  The Genetics Revolution
The Aspen Ideas Festival asked me a few questions about how CRISPR and other new technologies are changing science and shaping our future. Here's my response.
  Social Media Notes
If you like to get your updates on Goodreads, here is my page. On Facebook, I've started posting updates on my books and such on my author page. Hit "like" to get the posts in your feed.
  Good Stuff
Your moment of geological Zen.

STAT looks at the horrifying future of opioid addiction.

The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy is now entirely empty.

How climate change will impoverish the American South.

Following up on my recent story on genes that influence intelligence, a geneticist shows just how badly they predict actual intelligence--at least for now.

A landmark study nails down just how dangerous a popular class of insecticides are to bees.

NASA runs a child slave ring on Mars. At least that's what Alex Jones is suggesting.

British journalist Adam Rutherford has published a great book on how genetics is changing how we think about human ancestry: A Brief History of Everyone Who Has Ever Lived. It will come out in the U.S. in October, but you can pre-order it now.

Maia Szavalitz writes about the Holocaust survivor who is bankrolling the psychedelic revolution in psychology.

John Oliver continues to bring the science: this week he talked about vaccines.

  Upcoming Talks
October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture

November 15, University of Oxford. Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

A few days ago I reached the end of my manuscript for my upcoming book about heredity, which I've tentatively called She Has Her Mother's Laugh. Of course, I'm not quite done: there are still a few [Fill in really complicated stuff here] markers that I'm going to have to attend to. Nevertheless, it is a huge relief to type those three letters. In future emails, I'll send updates on the book: the cover, the official publication date next year, talks, reviews, Instagrams of uses as doorstops and paperweights, etc.

Since the last Friday's Elk, I've written a few columns for the New York Times:

1. This week, some scientists made a pretty bold claim: humans were in California 130,000 years ago. That's extreme for a few reasons, such as the fact that they'd probably have to be Neanderthals or some other population of humans not around today. In my column, I lay out the evidence, and the objections from other scientists. (And here's a Q & A I did for "California Today," a newsletter from the Times.)

2. Different species make for different parents. For the first time, scientists have been able to cross-breed two species (mice in this case) and discover a genetic difference that helps make parents either doting or absentee.

3. The Industrial Age has altered the planet in many ways. It has changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, acidified the ocean, and raised the average surface temperature by about 2 degrees F since 1880. A new study shows that by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we've also accelerated the photosynthesis of plants worldwide.

--On the talk front, last week I joined a panel of scientists and journalists at Yale for an event called "Truth in the Internet Age: Science Under Siege.” You can watch the video here.

I've got a few more talks falling into place in the next few months. Details to come for all of these...

June 25-28, Aspen Ideas Festival

October 11, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture

October 27-29, San Francisco: World Conference of Science Journalists

November 15, University of Oxford: Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture

January 3-7, 2018, San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture

Finally, I wanted to send out another reminder about "Thread," a four-day storytelling workshop in June at Yale. I'll be joining a pretty great crew of journalists, podcasters, and multimedia machers. Join us!


  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

The other day I used Post-it notes to organize my ideas for the last chapter of my book about heredity. On the one hand, getting to this point feels good: Last chapter! Lots of ideas! On the other hand, you readers probably won't be happy with a pile of Post-it notes at the end of my book. So...I'm busy.

Since the last Friday's Elk, I've published a couple columns for the New York Times. Recently, a group of scientists published a review about the emerging science of making embryo-like...things. They're not eggs fertilized by sperm. They're reprogrammed stem cells that, when combined with each other, start to develop embryo-like features. We can learn a lot from them. But how far should we let them go? Here's my look at the ethics of this brave new world.

In another column, I wrote about the deep history of Australia. People arrived in Australia well over 40,000 years ago, judging by their skeletons and artifacts. In recent years, geneticists have also been finding clues to their history, in the DNA of living Aboriginal Australians. I wrote about a new study that suggests the first Australians arrived around 50,000 years ago, spread quickly around the perimeter of the continent, and then pretty much stayed put. There was no major mixing of the regional populations once they settled down. You can read about the study here.

Finally, Stanford Medicine published a nice piece on the talk I gave there earlier this month about looking at my genome.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

I'm writing to you from the lovely town of La Jolla, California, where I'm participating in Future of Genomic Medicine, a meeting where scientists are talking about how sequencing our DNA is going to affect our lives. I gave a talk yesterday about the experience of getting my genome sequenced. If you're on Twitter, you can read about the presentations under the hashtag #FOGM17.

From here, I'm heading to Palo Alto. If you live anywhere near Stanford University, please consider joining me for a talk at 1 pm on Monday, March 6, in McCaw Hall. I'm giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. Details here.

In my column this week for the New York Times, I wrote about what may be the world's oldest known fossils. Or not. They may be 3.77 billion years old. Or 4.2 billion. What's half a billion years between friends? This sort of uncertainty comes with the job when you're a scientist trying to reconstruct the first chapters of Earth's history. These fossils come from what may be the world's oldest known rocks, from a formation in Canada. I wrote about the debate over their age in 2014 in Scientific American.

This week I also spoke to the BBC about de-extinction. I joined a group of scientists and writers on BBC Newshour Extra. You can listen to it here. And here's a feature on de-extinction I wrote for National Geographic.


  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings! Here's a quick update since the last Friday's Elk.

1. The oceans contain vast underwater prairies known as seagrass meadows. For my column this week in the New York Times, I write about the remarkable services they provide to us--including killing off disease-causing bacteria. Maybe if we come to appreciate their value, we'll stop destroying them at the rate of a football field every thirty minutes. (Image: prilfish via Creative Commons)

2. Why do we sleep? For my previous "Matter" column, I write about scientists who are inspecting the molecular changes that occur in the brain when we doze. Their results suggest that we prune away some connections between our neurons--sharpening our memories, as it were.

3. My latest Science Happens video for Stat is up! I visit a lab where engineers are reinventing the MRI scanner, to make it tiny enough to fit in the back of an ambulance and rugged enough to set up in a battlefield hospital.

4. I'll be giving a couple talks in the next few weeks:

-->March 2: Future of Genomic Medicine, La Jolla, California. Details here.

-->March 6: Palo Alto: Keynote lecture at the annual meeting at the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. Free and open to the public. Details here.

5. If you're writer, podcaster, multimedia master, or other species of professional communicator, please consider attending Thread at Yale in June. I'll be one of the instructors at this three-day event. Details here.

6. On his blog, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, very kindly mentioned my book Parasite Rex, calling it "a riveting, firsthand account of how 'sneaky' parasites can be." It's 17 years too late for the hardback blurbs, but maybe I can sneak onto the next paperback printing!
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings! I have just a couple notes for you in this issue of Friday's Elk.

1. Earlier this week, I published a column in the New York Times about the awful state of our fellow primates. Many species are dangerously close to extinction, due to human activity across the planet. If we want to save them, the time is now.

2. If you're going to the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival this coming weekend, please join me on Saturday at 3:40 pm and on Sunday at 12:40 pm. I'll be talking about the dangers of viruses, both old and new.

3. Finally, in a nice bit of news, I found out this week that the video series I host for Stat, "Science Happens," is a finalist for a National Magazine Award!

  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Happy 2017! (I confess, I had to correct that from "2016" just before sending this out.)

This week I wrote a column about migrations. There's something endlessly fascinating about migratory animals: namely, the huge amount of things we don't understand about them. We're not sure how they manage to make the same journeys every year. Sometimes it's hard to know why they bother. Sometimes we don't even quite know the course they take.

For this week's Times column, I looked at new technologies that are revealing how birds sync their migrations for thousand of miles to the seasonal cycles of plants, ensuring that whenever they land, there's food to eat. Like so many things in the natural world, this new research shows, climate change may prove incredibly disruptive to these migrations. (Image: Palle Sørensen)

(I've written about animal migrations before here and here and here.)

This week I also wrote a story for Nautilus about the birth of biotechnology. As is so often the case, a powerful application emerged out of pure curiosity. That should be a lesson to people who think scientists should only study things they know in advance will benefit humanity.
  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival I will be speaking about the year in viruses, both on Saturday at 3:40 pm and on Sunday at 12:40 pm. Full schedule here.

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

It's hard to believe this will be the last Friday's Elk of 2016. I just wanted to thank everyone for being curious enough about my work to clutter your inboxes with emails from me.

One of the advantages of sending out a semi-regular newsletter is that it's easy to scan back over them and consider which experiences of this past year stood out.

This fall marked my one-year anniversary as a contributing national correspondent for Stat. Among the most satisfying features I wrote for them were a story about the struggle to find the molecular basis of memory, a piece about an experimental procedure to save a man's life with viruses, and a three-part series about getting my genome sequenced.

At the New York Times, I continued in 2016 to focus on our species and what scientists are learning about its history, including the identity of the first farmers and how our species started in Africa and then spread around the world. I also wrote a profile of one of the leading explorers of ancient human DNA. A piece on our extensive interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans even inspired a love song from comedian Harry Shearer. In addition, I looked further back into our deep history, considering how our fins became hands and where we fit on the tree of life.

On the book front, A Planet of Viruses got translated into French, and Parasite Rex got translated into Spanish. And, of course, I worked like mad on my next book, on heredity. It's such a rich subject that I will probably be spending the next few months deciding what to leave out. Killing my darlings, in other words. I'll keep you updated in the coming year about its progress.

I spent a fair amount of the year on the road and the phone, talking about science. Among my favorites is a conversation I had in the spring with the historian Daniel Kevles about the prospect of reengineering humanity. Inquiring Minds had me on their show to talk about viruses. In Texas, I gave the Stephen Jay Gould Prize Lecture about human evolution. On Innovation Hub, I talked about what our genomes can and can't tell us. And at the end of the year, I talked about writing about science with the good people at Longform.

Finally, here's my latest Matter column, just out on Wednesday in the Times. I consider the question of maturity--when we are old enough to vote, to drive, to be tried as an adult. Judges would like some easy answers from neuroscience, but the picture that the researchers are uncovering is not simple. But it is fascinating in its complexity.

Best wishes for 2017. We will be living through some interesting times, to put it mildly. I'll be doing my part to chronicle them.
  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. I will be speaking about the year in viruses, both on Saturday at 3:40 pm and on Sunday at 12:40 pm. Full schedule here.

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

The writing life can be lumpy. Last week was so quiet that I didn't bother sending out a Friday's Elk. Today, on the other hand, I've got a batch of things to tell you about.
  A Talk With Longform
I'm a huge fan of the Longform podcast, a weekly interview with journalists about their careers and how they do their work. When I teach writing, I always make sure to include links to some Longform episodes on the syllabus so that students can get a sense of what it's really like to be a journalist.

This week they had me on their show. I talked with Evan Ratliff (founder of the Atavist and a fine journalist in his own right) about the consolations of science, about finding stories, and a childhood puzzlement over ticks. You can listen here.
  A Shot to the Heart (of Viruses)
A century ago, scientists discovered viruses that kill bacteria. They started using them as a way to fight infections, a method called phage therapy. But when antibiotics arose, phage therapy faded away from medicine in the United States and Europe. For Stat, I've written a story about scientists who are trying to bring phage therapy back to the west. They injected viruses discovered in a lake into a man's chest to save his life. Check it out.
  Watching Evolution in Action (The Scary Kind)
This week I have a new Science Happens! video for Stat. I paid a visit to a lab where scientists have built a gigantic petri dish the size of a ping-pong table. They can observe bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics in real time. You can watch it here.
  Why Don't Monkeys Talk?
For my latest "Matter" column for the New York Times, I take a look at the evolution of speech. People naturally learn to speak, but other primates have never been documented to do so. A team of scientists who have video-taped monkeys have concluded that they have the anatomical wherewithal for human speech. The crucial differences may therefore be in the brain. You can read my column here.


  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Apologies for the long radio silence. This month has been full of distractions, and not just the election. I went to London for a few days to report on a scientific meeting about evolution and cranking out a story about it. It was published this Tuesday by Quanta.

Seventy years ago, geneticists and other researchers created a new framework for investigating Darwin's theory of evolution. The Modern Synthesis, as it's now known, has been a powerful tool ever since. But in recent years, some scientists have argued that it needs an overhaul. They've developed a new framework that they call an "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis." They hold that we need a broader understanding of the causes of evolutionary change. Scientists need to take into account the constraints on development, for example. They need to explore how species shape their environment, which in turn shapes their evolution.

At the London meeting, some of these scientists were met head-on by skeptical biologists who don't see what the fuss is about. These debates are a vital part of the scientific enterprise, and I found it fascinating to watch one play out in such a public way. You can read my account here.

After I got home, I wrote a new column for the New York Times about global warming. In the past few weeks there's been a lot of news about just how hard the Arctic is getting slammed by the greenhouse gases we've put in the atmosphere, with insanely high temperatures and staggeringly low levels of ice.

There are many reasons to take this change seriously, one of which is that the ecology of the entire Arctic Ocean is changing as a result. I wrote about a new study showing how the ocean's food web is getting massively altered by the retreat of the ice. You can read it here. (Image courtesy of Mati Kahru.)

I can't predict what this coming year will be like. But I do promise that I will work as hard as I can to learn about what scientists are discovering about global warming, evolution, and other aspects of the natural world, and I will write about it for you as accurately as I can. That's my job, and nothing will change that.
  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

This week I revisited the science of Ebola.

In 2014, in the midst of the the outbreak in West Africa, I wrote a couple articles for the New York Times about how Ebola works and how it evolved. At the time, there were a lot of claims that Ebola was on the verge of becoming an airborne nightmare, which I tried to debunk with inteviews with virologists and evolutionary biologists. Afterwards, I wrote a new chapter about Ebola for the second edition of my book A Planet of Viruses, which came out last year.

While the outbreak has ended, research on it continues. And two studies published this week (and a third on the way) indicate that a mutation arose in the epidemic that made Ebola better at infecting human cells. That's not the same thing as a virus sprouting wings, but it is a potentially worrying sign of Ebola's adaptability.

Next week, I'm going to be traveling to do research for my book on heredity and an article (details to come). So I'll be sending out the next Friday's Elk on November 18.

  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

This week: a look at a globalist rodent...
  A Rat's History of the World
A few years ago I clambered into some of the remoter corners of New York City's parks with the biologist Jason Munshi-South. I watched him study the city's wildlife, seeking to understand how New York was sculpting evolution. Out of that experience came an article for the New York Times.

I've followed Munshi-South's work ever since, and this week I wrote up his latest study. Recently Munshi-South and his colleagues took a look at the DNA of New York City's rats, trying to figure out where they came from. Ultimately, that question led them to ask how brown rats conquered the world. (Image: Wikipedia)
  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Last week was a lull, but this week I have a few things to share...

  Who Were the First Farmers?
The agricultural revolution that began 11,000 years ago changed humanity as well as the planet. But how did the transformation happen? Some intriguing clues have emerged in recent months from ancient DNA extracted for the first time from the oldest skeletons of farmers. I wrote a feature for the New York Times about the new findings, and how archaeologists are folding them into their understanding of how farming began. (Image: P. Dorrell and S. Laidlaw/The Ain Ghazal Archaeological Project)

  A Vaccine for the Common Cold?
In the early 1970s, scientists were making great strides towards a vaccine for the common cold. And then research ground to a halt. There hasn't been a human trial of a cold vaccine for forty years. Now there's a revival of research, driven by a realization that colds can be a lot worse than we once thought. I've got a story on the turnaround in Stat.

  A Brain Workout
For my latest Science Happens! video, I paid a visit to Wendy Suzuki at New York University. Suzuki is exploring how the body can affect the brain--in particular, how exercise can improve our memory and attention. Suzuki put me on a treadmill and gave me some cognition tests to show me how it works. Check it out.


  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. ***Here's a pdf of the speakers.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Thanks to Dana Ehret for taking pictures of my talk Thursday at the University of Alabama. Before speaking about human-driven evolution, I had an excellent day talking with UA biologists about turtles and death cap mushrooms and other glories of Alabama's biodiversity.

  Does the Human Lifespan Have a Limit?
Aging is one of those science-journalism topics that never gets old. (Sorry.) Over the years, I've written a number of pieces on what happens when we get old, and why we get old in the first place. You can read some of them here here here and here. Also, you can watch this Science Happens video or this lecture I gave at Stony Brook on the evolution of aging (I wrote it up here.)

On Wednesday, a provocative new study on aging came out. Researchers looked at the demography of aging over the past century and came to the conclusion that we have hit a biological limit. I report on the study this week in the New York Times.
  Creating A Portrait of the Human Gene Pool
At Stat, I've written a feature about a new way at looking at genomes: as a map-like graph. The genome graph may let scientists understand genomes at a deeper level, and understand the interconnections between millions of genomes at once. You can read it here.


  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

It was a busy week for me: a talk in Boston, a shoot for an upcoming Science Happens video, and a lot of time spent burrowing deep into my next book. On Thursday I'll resurface in Alabama to give a lecture at UA about evolution in our own time. So, Alabamians, I hope to see you there! Here are the details about this free lecture.

  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

  Out of Africa: What the Genomes Say
Back in December, when I was working on a profile of the geneticist Eske Willerslev, he told me off the record that he and his colleagues had a huge new genome paper in the works that would offer a lot of clues about human history. But it would take a while to come out because similar papers were going to be published at the same time by other scinetists.

Well, the wheels turn slowly, but they were worth the wait. On Thursday's front page of the New York Times, I reported on four new studies that give an unprecedented look at our origins. There was a whole lot to write about--more than can fit in one article, so I focused on one of the most contentious questions in paleoanthropology: how did humans emerge out of Africa and settle the rest of the world? Some fascinating possibilities emerge from these new studies on hundreds of genomes.
  Good Cop Meets Bad Cop in the Microbial World
My conversation with Sonia Shah and Ed Yong at the Brooklyn Book Festival has been posted on C-SPAN. You can watch it here.
  The Talks
THIS MONDAY 9/26: Massachusetts General Hospital/Boston's HUBWeek. “The Art of Talking Science.” Here are the details.

October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details here.

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

The Antibiotic Crisis: What's New Is Old The Stephen Jay Gould Prize Lecture Upcoming: Brooklyn Gets Infected, and "American Idol" for Scientists What Are Our Genes Telling Us?
Death to the Embargo System!
This item may feel to some of you like inside baseball, but it's important to us science writers. We are hemmed in by a system of embargoes imposed by prominent science journals. Personally, I think they're a bad idea. Now a hack of the dominant embargoed-news web site, has partially paralyzed the system. I think it may be a good exercise for us step out of the cave and blink in the sunlight. Over at Retraction Watch, some of us journalists exchange views on the issue.
  The Talks The End
 

A Life (And Death?) In the Trees
You've probably heard about Lucy. She's a 3.2-million-year-old relative of ours, a bipedal ape who only stood three feet tall. She's famous for the discovery of her partial skeleton in 1974, a discovery that enabled scientists to learn a lot about her life, and about her species, Australopithecus afarensis. Now a team of scientists has put forward evidence about how she died: by a long fall from a tree. If they're right, her death might actually tell us a lot about her life, too--and about how we evolved to walk upright. But hold on--as I wrote in the New York Times on Monday--a number of other experts don't think the scientists have made a compelling case. Regardless of how she died, however, this research has led to something pretty exciting: you can download the 3-D scans of some of Lucy's bones and print out replicas.
  This Week In Genomes
I paid a visit to the good folks at This Week In Science on Wednesday to talk about getting my genome sequenced. You can watch here, although between my fuzzy camera and fuzzier beard, you may just want to listen.
  Next Week In Nebraska
Just a reminder that I'm heading to Lincoln, Nebraska, next week to give a public lecture about our 500-year quest to map the brain. Details here.


  The Talks
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details here.

September 15: Washington DC. “The Emergence of Life: On the Earth, in the Lab, and Elsewhere.” Panel discussion at a daylong public conference at the Library of Congress.

September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. I'll be joining Ed Yong and others. Details here.

October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Hard believe it, but here's the last Friday's Elk of summer vacation...
  The Amazing Axolotl
I recently paid a visit to the lab of Jessica Whited, an assistant professor in the orthopedic surgery department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Whited doesn't study people. Instead, she studies a spooky salamander called the axolotl. What makes the axolotl amazing is that it can regrow and entire leg in a matter of days. Whited is studying its powers of regeneration in the hopes of finding lessons that doctors can apply to people, coaxing our own bodies to fix themselves. I profile Whited in my latest "Science Happens!" video for Stat.
  No Sleep Till Brooklyn!
The Brooklyn Book Festival has now posted the details for my talk on September 18. I'm joining fellow microbial enthusiasts Ed Yong and Sonia Shah to talk about bacteria, viruses, and how they protect and destroy us.


  The Talks
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details here.

September 15: Washington DC. “The Emergence of Life: On the Earth, in the Lab, and Elsewhere.” Panel discussion at a daylong public conference at the Library of Congress.

September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. A panel on bacteria and viruses with Ed Yong and Sonia Shah. Details here.

October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Front page news this week!
  Hands and Fins, Twenty Years Later
Twenty years ago, scientists were starting to study evolution in a new way: by picking apart the genes that govern the development of animals. Reporting on their work for Discover at the time, I was incredibly excited to watch the research unfold. Scientists could generate hypotheses about genetic changes that occurred millions of years ago, giving rise to new structures like limbs and wings. This new field of "evo-devo," as it was sometimes called, helped inspire me to write my first book, At the Water's Edge.

This kind of science depends for its progress not just on new ideas but also new tools. In just the past few years, the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR has turned out to be a tremendously powerful tool for the evo-devo crowd, allowing them to find new secrets about evolution.

On the front page of Thursday's New York Times, I reported on a new study in which scientists used CRISPR to discover a hidden evolutionary link between our hands and fish fins. The research I wrote about this week was led by Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago. Two decades ago, when I was writing At the Water's Edge, I spent a few pages recounting the adventures of a young, up-and-coming evo-devo expert. His name was Neil Shubin.

Much to the regret of science writers everywhere, Shubin turned out to be an excellent author himself. For more on the evolution of limbs from fins, check out his book, Your Inner Fish, or the PBS series of the same name which he hosted.
  A Game of Genomes Post-Script: The Database That Saved Me From A Lifetime of Dread
While working on my Game of Genomes series, I learned that I have a mutation in a heart-muscle gene that's been linked to sudden cardiac death. But I haven't been crying myself to sleep at night, because I also learned that the studies linking the mutation to the disorder were almost certainly wrong. A database called ExAC brought me that peace of mind. This week in STAT, I wrote about ExAC, and a new study by its creators on just how much it tells us about what we do and don't understand about the human genome.

  The Talks
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details here.

September 15: Washington DC. “The Emergence of Life: On the Earth, in the Lab, and Elsewhere.” Panel discussion at a daylong public conference at the Library of Congress.

September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. I'll be joining Ed Yong and others. Details to come.

October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings after a week of vacation!
  On the Origin of Orgasms (with a Surprise Cameo by JK Rowling)
Bet you never saw those words in that particular combination. Here's the story:

Recently two scientists put together a new hypothesis about the evolution of the female orgasm. They argue that female mammals had orgasms, or at least precursors of them, 150 million years ago. And it started out with a function that was lost in our ancestors long ago.

I wrote about their study, and the response from other researchers, for my column last week in the New York Times. It triggered a lot of comments, including much snark.

Even JK Rowling chimed in, cracking a joke on Twitter.

But a writer for the Daily Mail got my tweets mixed up and wrongly reported that I had scolded Rowling for not reading my article.

I tried to sort things out on Storify. No correction from the Mail, though.
  A Game of Genomes Q & A
The Forward talked to me about my Game of Genomes series at Stat. We discussed what it's like to get up close and personal with your genome, and what DNA can--and cannot--tell you about yourself.
  New Events
Just wanted to draw your attention to a couple newly added talks below--one with fellow scribe Ed Yong in Brooklyn, one at the Library of Congress, one at the University of Alabama, and one at the next Future of Genome Medicine meeting.


  The Talks
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details here.

September 15: Washington DC. “The Emergence of Life: On the Earth, in the Lab, and Elsewhere.” Panel discussion at a daylong public conference at the Library of Congress.

September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. I'll be joining Ed Yong and others. Details to come.

October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

It's a little disturbing to realized that this is my last newsletter of July. Time is moving too fast. But at least I have accumulated a few things to offer you from the past week...
  For Your Binge-Reading Consideration
I'm forever grateful that the good folks at Stat let me go a bit crazy in writing about my genome. Now at last the whole three-part beast is online, complete with my Neanderthal genes and inner viruses. If you haven't read it yet, now you can just binge through it like a night of "Breaking Bad."
 
For the scientific backstory, be sure to check out the supplementary data site.

I was also interviewed about the whole experience by Hank Green for his great Youtube series SciShow.
  What Is a Wolf?
I've been fascinated for a long time about how we define species. Species are not fixed from time immemorial; they're the product of evolution and are themselves continuing to evolve--to split, to merge, to split again. In 2008 I wrote in Scientific American about the species puzzle, with wolves as my prime example.

Eight years later, wolves continue to challenge our typological thinking. A new study on wolf genomes may lead to a new way of drawing the line between wolf species--with major implications for how we conserve them. I have the story in my column this week in the New York Times.
  When I Snap My Fingers, You Will Read This Article...
Hypnosis exists in that fuzzy space between stage performance and medical treatment. To figure out what is really going on when people get hypnotized, some scientists have turned to brain scanners. I wrote a piece for Stat about what they found.
  A Little More Radio
I talked to WNPR about how global warming is changing the map of nature. (Here's a column from last year I wrote on the oceans in particular.)

I talked to WBEZ about an important new brain atlas. (Here's my column on the research.)
  As I mentioned in an earlier edition of Friday's Elk, I talked at the Strand Bookstore in New York with the historian Daniel Kevles about the past and future of gene editing. We asked each other a series of questions, and you can watch the video of our answers here.
  The Talks
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah: "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Broken Genes and Protector Genes
The GOP convention is over, and summer has clamped its heat dome on us. This may be just the time for you to sit down with my "Game of Genomes" series at Stat.

Here's Season One.

Season Two came out on Monday.

And tune back in this coming Monday for the rousing finale, in which I use my genome as a time machine to look back our evolutionary past. Then I look forward to a time when we all get our genome sequenced at the doctor's office. (Alas, that future isn't coming tomorrow.)

Also this week, I had a blast talking on Reddit for one of their AMA's. You can read the conversation here.

I also talked to "How on Earth" on KGNU in Boulder, Colorado. Listen here.

I'll have links to other shows next week, too.
  A New Map for the Brain
A couple years ago, I wrote a feature for National Geographic about the brain's new mapmakers. I've been trying to keep up with their work since then. This week, one team unveiled an impressive new map, based on intensive scans of hundreds of volunteers. I wrote about their work for my latest column in the New York Times.


  The Talks
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah: "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

"Game of Genomes" is here!
For the past few months, I've been traveling through my genome with the guidance of a couple dozen scientists. On Monday, Stat published the first part of my narrative of the experience. You can read it here.

As part of the package, I've also set up a parallel web site for the scientific nuts and bolts. I've posted some of the analysis that researchers produced while poring over my genome. And you can find the raw data of my genome there, too (including files of variants, and the original, gigantic BAM file). I hope it will be of use to teachers who want to show students how to make sense of a genome. I will add more materials as the next two parts of the series are published.

This week I also talked about the experience a few times.

Here's my interview with "The Takeaway."

Here's my interview with "Here & Now."

And here's an article in Boston Magazine.

On Monday, the second installment of "Game of Genomes" will be published by Stat. I'll be investigating some of the biggest mysteries of our genomes. Only about one percent of our DNA, for example, encodes protein-coding genes. The other ninety-nine percent is a vast expanse of junk with a few jewels sprinkled here and there. I enlist a scientist to help me hunt for one of those jewels and show me how it influences my health. I hope you enjoy it.
  And Now For Something Completely Different: The Mysterious Healing Power of Poop
I can still remember the shock and disbelief I felt when I first heard about fecal transplants--a treatment for lethal gut infections that involves putting stool from a healthy person into a sick patient. Today it's clear that fecal transplants work very well--often curing patients for whom antibiotics have failed.

But why they work remains something of a mystery. Poop turns out to be remarkably complex. I write about the best hunches that scientists have so far for my column this week in the New York Times.

There's an intriguing parallel between their ideas and my earlier column about how soil microbes can protect crops from diseases. Microbiomes everywhere!
  The Talks
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah: "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Monday: Ask Me Anything!
I was so busy looking back at the week that was that I forgot to mention that, on Monday at 3 pm ET, I will be on Reddit for an AMA about my genome series.

I'll be answering questions about what it's like to look at your own genome, the future of genomes in medicine, the evolutionary clues hidden in our DNA, and whatever other questions you may have. Please join us.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Last summer, I found a way to get my genome sequenced--and to get my hands on the raw data.

I then enlisted a couple dozen scientists to join me on a trip into my DNA, pushing beyond standard genetic counseling to discover the weirdness the lurks in all our genomes. I encountered ancient viruses, Neanderthal genes, broken genetic switches, and genes that protect me from diseases.

The experience was so rich and rewarding that I ended up writing a three-part series about it for Stat. The first part will come out on Stat Monday morning. The next two will come out the following Mondays. I hope you enjoy it! (And for scientists and other genome junkies, I'm going to set up a parallel site where all the data will be freely available.)

On Monday around 9:30 am ET I'm going to talk about the series on "The Takeaway." I'll also be talking about it in other venues in the days to come. I'll post updates on Twitter and Facebook, as well as in next week's newsletter.
  The Talks
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah: "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Happy July! Here are a couple things I published this week. I've also got a big project to unveil soon that I hope you'll enjoy. I'll spill some details in next week's newsletter.
  What Do We Really Know About Epigenetics?
Epigenetics is one of those subjects that's irresistible to a science writer. Our DNA is enveloped by proteins and molecular caps that influence how active our genes can get. Some studies have suggested these epigenetic marks are the way in which the environment can reach into our cells and alter the workings of our DNA. But there's a big debate in the epigenetics field about just how meaningful that research is. The studies may only be uncovering biological randomness, or perhaps some other process in our cells. Given that I've written my own share of articles about epigenetics (here and here, for example), I decided I needed to pay some attention to the skeptics, too. That's the subject of my column this week in the New York Times.
  Bedtime for Drosophila
My new Science Happens video is out. I pay a visit to the lab of Amita Sehgal at Penn, where she studies the sleeping habits of flies. It turns out that flies doze a lot like we do, down to the genes that control their inner clock. Check it out.
  The Talks
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah: "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl

Greetings from Durham!

Durham isn't quite the brutal oven that Austin was, but it's pretty sultry. I'm here for the annual International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health meeting. I gave a plenary talk about reporting on evolutionary medicine. Some stories virtually write themselves, while others, on tricky concepts like imprinting, require a lot of wrestling. With my talk over, I get to enjoy a couple days of presentations about research about everything from sex chromosomes to mountain sickness.
  Contagious Cancer On the Loose
Sometimes I like to write about rare, weird corners of biology. One of my long-time favorites corners is contagious cancer: cases in which a cancer cell breaks free of its host and invades other bodies, evolving into an immortal parasite. Until last year, scientists only had good evidence for contagious in Tasmanian devils and dogs. Here are a few pieces I've written over the years in the Times and the Loom...

Scientists Discover Origin of a Cancer in Tasmanian Devils

Raising Devils in Seclusion

How A Dog Has Lived For Eleven Thousand Years–In Other Dogs

Now it turns out that contagious cancer may not be rare at all. For the full (and freaky) story, see my column this week in the New York Times.
  The Memory Wars
I wrote a feature for Stat about a long-running debate about how memory works. It'a also a story about how scientific findings can get shot down, and what it takes for scientists to try to bring them back into favor.
  The Talks
June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, "Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA." Details here.

July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah. The talk is entitled, "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"

September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come

January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl