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!
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
If you'd like to learn more about my books, you can visit my web site
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