Carl Zimmer
ddobbs | May 11, 2010
I've been deemed a pusher, and that's a good thing.
The accuser is Colin Schultz, a busy, curious, and inquisitive young journalist who awarded a story of mine his first annual prize for "push" science journalism. First of all let me say I'm pleased, mainly because the story, " A Depression Switch?", about neurologist Helen Mayberg's experiment using deep brain stimulation to treat depression, is one of the most fascinating, enthralling, and rewarding I've ever worked on.
But what is this push journalism business? Push science journalism, says Colin, is science writing that…
ddobbs | April 29, 2010I had the pleasure of attending the Genomes, Environment, and Traits conference on Tuesday. Was wonderful and strange, with many inspiring, exciting, and/or entertaining moments -- and a few things a bit worrisome.
The twitter feed from the event tracks the talks and agenda pretty thoroughly; it's far better than my own notes. I especially enjoyed the morning's main event, in which a tag team of Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer called to stage for interviews different combinations of 13 the 10 "pioneers" who had been among the first to have their entire genomes run. As a journalist, I had…
ddobbs | March 26, 2010
from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis
House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog.
Brain and Mind
Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning.
As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…
laelaps | March 16, 2010
Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year's ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers about subjects which they feel passionate about. There is no single science blog archetype that all blogs must fit, and this flexibility allows science writers the freedom to compose and promote their work in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
Hindsight being what it is, of course, I can look…
ddobbs | March 15, 2010
We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust.
Genetic material
Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened.
The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective
Culture and the human genome From the excellent A Replicated Typo. (That's gene humor, is 'replicated typo.')
Going to J School
State of the Media, By the Numbers : CJR A review of a review: Columbia Journalism reviews Pew's "State of the Media" report. Eye-popping numbers and…
ddobbs | January 31, 2010
Me (right) hypnotizing Carl Zimmer just before the Rebooting Science Journalism session at ScienceOnline 2010. It worked. Carl had planned to use his 5 minutes to just say, "We are DOOOMED." Instead he talked about duck sex.
I've been meaning for two weeks now to post on ScienceOnline 2010 and the Rebooting Science Journalism session, in which I joined Ed Yong, John Timmer, and Carl Zimmer as "unpanelists." Lest another frenzied week delay me further, here's my addition to the #scio10 #reboot corpus.
Journalists-v-bloggers is (almost) dead
Many at the conference, and pretty much everyone…
ddobbs | January 29, 2010Hits of the week:
Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
ddobbs | January 13, 2010
Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina for the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, or unconference, where on Saturday I will sit down with Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and anyone else who squeezes into the room, to talk about rebooting science journalism. The obvious assumption behind the topic (if I can return to the titular metaphor) is that science journalism is such a mess that it needs not just cleaning up, but a wholesale restart. But "rebooting" is probably too mild a term for what most people think is needed; if we're to stick with digital metaphors, I'd to say the assumption is more that…
ddobbs | December 18, 2009
I wanted to rig up an electrified fence around the falsehood to keep the producers from sneaking back to it
via blogs.discovermagazine.com
Carl Zimmer on just how damned bad much science TV is. I've not advised programs, as Carl has, but the times I've seen subjects I'd written about covered on TV -- DBS for depression, and Williams syndrome, which I'd written about for the Times Mag and both of which were subsequently covered by 60 MInutes -- the TV results were truly appalling. And that was the hallowed supposedly best-of TV 60 Minutes.
It's nice when you see it done better. Too bad it's…
ddobbs | December 17, 2009At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest.
One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…
rskloot | November 14, 2009
Big week here at Culture Dish! The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and its author (yours truly) were on the cover of Publishers Weekly (please note: THRILLED!). Inside that issue was a profile of me with some of book's backstory, a short excerpt from the book (longer excerpt coming soon in O, the Oprah Magazine), also a story I wrote about the crazy book tour I'm organizing (posted about previously here). But that was just the beginning of this week's HeLa developments. More about that after the jump, but first, a warning: given the fact that my book is about to be released and I'll be on…
ddobbs | July 8, 2009I must keep my nose on the not-beta, hidden-till-last-minute, writing-Not-For-FREE grindstone, where it's getting shredded to bits -- but in the meantime, wanted to pass on these worthy web distractions, worthy of full engagement if you've the time:
Vaughan Bell peeks at The long dark nightie of the soul and wonders "why mentally distressed women are always portrayed in their nighties." Separately, he considers some strange security concerns raised by the growing use of brain implants.
Much interesting attention to schizophrenia this week: A big study parsing the genetics of schizophrenia,…
ddobbs | July 1, 2009
Among the many treats in Carl Zimmer's new Times piece on fireflies and sex -- go, and be enchanted -- I particularly liked this quick peek at how a life and a career can take a sharp turn for the most unplanned of reasons:
It was on a night much like this one in 1980 when Dr. Lewis first came under the spell of fireflies. She was in graduate school at Duke University, studying coral reef fish. Waiting for a grant to come through for a trip to Belize, she did not have much else to do but sit in her backyard in North Carolina.
"Every evening there was this incredible display of fireflies…
ddobbs | June 25, 2009Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables:
Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers.
Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
ddobbs | June 16, 2009SciAm ponders evidence that fish hatcheries are watering down the trout and salmon gene pool.
Matt Yglesias looks at one of many lies being told by those opposing health-care reform â confirming Salon's prediction that the opponents of reform are not going to play nice. See also The American Prospect on How Big Pharma Intends to Kill the Public Option. I should add this campaign is having an effect: On the radio this morning I heard NPR Steve Insky Inskeep vigorously press the "public plan as trojan horse" attack on Kathleen Sibelius; I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Ed Yong examines how a simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students.
The Questionable Authority considers The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath.
Jessica Palmer, in a healthy display of online media's corrective power, tries to make clear that For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!.
Zimmer takes a tour of assisted migration.
Effect measure argues the lack of universal health care in the US is morally and fiscally bankrupt.
ddobbs | March 3, 2009Carl explains this:
After death, brains that do not simply disappear sometimes get smaller. In this particular fish, Sibyrhynchus denisoni the brain must have gotten a lot smaller. Check out this image, in which the braincase is in red, and the brain is in yellow. (The scale bar is 5 millimeters.)
The subject is a paper in PNAS that's available to journalists but no one else so far, yet not still embargoed ... a policy I sort of like for selfish reasons but still can't figure out. This means this link to the paper won't work for a few more days. Paper is on a 3M-year-old fossilized brain,…
amillikan | February 21, 2009In this week's Science Saturday, blogger and astronomer Phil Plait chats with science journalist Carl Zimmer. They talk about the time Buzz Aldrin punched a moon-landing denialist in the face, how consumer-culture gadgetry can serve the cause of science, the death of newspapers in the Internet age, and the big questions in astronomy that Phil hopes we'll have answers for soon.
amillikan | January 19, 2009In this week's Science Saturday, science writers Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer look ahead at the scientific controversies and discoveries of the coming year. Will Craig Venter finally produce artificial life in 2009? Will NASA find proof of Martian life? Will the public become even less informed about science? And perhaps most importantly, will Obama's science policy improve on Bush's?
ddobbs | December 15, 2008Carl Zimmer faces the wrath with cheerful good humor.
The source of his troubles: