Greetings--
I'm back, with some further reading for your enjoyment and edification (I hope!).
Fighting Zika with the Most Amazing Microbe
Have you ever heard of
Wolbachia? If not, you have a wonderful surprise in store. It's arguably the most successful symbiont on Earth, a species of bacteria that lives inside several
million species of invertebrates. And it thrives in those hosts with weird manipulations of their reproduction. I've written about
Wolbachia a few times in the past (
here for example), and this week in the
New York Times I revisit it to explore an exciting possibility: that
Wolbachia could block mosquito-borne diseases including Zika and dengue fever.
Check it out.
Re-engineering Humanity
A few weeks ago, I mentioned I was going to talk with historian Daniel Kevles about the past and future of human engineering. Emily McManus, the editor of ted.com, came to the event, and has written up
this excellent piece about it.
Science & Storytelling
On April 25, I participated in a day-long meeting about how to tell the stories of science, hosted by National Geographic and Yale. The videos are now up on
this page. I talk in
this session (it's the third video on the meeting page). David Quammen's keynote on writing about Yellowstone is
here.
The Talks
June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award.
Details here
June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture.
Here's the meeting site.
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
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Best wishes, Carl
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