Andre Fenton, comeback memory player of the year
Carl Zimmer on memory researcher Andre Fenton, comeback researcher of the year. In an age when we get a lot of our medical news in click-baity headlines and has...
Tag: Carl Zimmer
Yaba-daba – my “Social Life of Genomes” story won a AAAS award.
A good day (so far). The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that “The Social Life of Genes” (Pacific Standard, Sept/Oct ...
Gay Genes, Death Papers, Parasites, Neanderthals, & Anja Niedringhaus. My Reads of the Week
The world has lost a truly splendid photographer — Anja Niedringhaus, murdered this week in Afghanistan. This was a determined, brave journalist and an unbeliev...
Naked Mole Rats Get Their Day in the Sun, Because Cancer
Turns out one of the world’s ugliest creatures, the naked mole rat, does not get cancer, even if you really hard to make it happen. The coverage is fabulo...
Serotonin, the Zombie Chemical
Neurotransmitters are highly important and mind-bendingly complex. That’s why now and then I hip-check writers who boil neurotransmitters down to s...
Don’t Step in That Sh*t: How the GMO-Study Authors Played the Media
Last week a small group of scientists and journalists signed a secret pact to do a bad, bad, really bad thing to science, journalism, and everyone that depends ...
Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” and the Perils of Neuro Self-Help, or How Dupe-amine Drove Me Into a Dark Dungeon
Someone should have warned Naomi Wolf what slippery material she’d get encounter by taking a neuro angle into Vagina: A New Biography. As Zoe Heller expla...
“How Full of Sh*t Are They?” and Other Questions Writers Ask
Q: Is that a real skull? A: Yes Q: Just how full of shit are they — like, completely? A: Completely. What kinds of questions do writers ask? Particularly when...
Arsenic is Life and the View From Nowhere
[Note: Major second thoughts at bottom; post retitled (formerly “Cutting to the Chase on the Arsenic Circus”)] Popular Science has run what strikes ...
Science Publishes “Arsenic is Life” Critiques. Game On.
Alert readers will remember the scuffle that broke out last summer December over the “arsenic-is-life” paper by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues th...