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Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer appears in the following:

The Great Brain Mapping Debate

Monday, April 02, 2012

Robert and Carl Zimmer teamed up tonight to moderate a brain mapping brouhaha live at Columbia University. The subject: does the brain's wiring make us who we are? The event has ended, but thanks to everyone who tuned in for the live webcast (and the lively web chat archived below).

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Gut Feelings

Monday, April 02, 2012

While Jad was on paternity leave, Carl Zimmer told Robert and producer Soren Wheeler about the ecosystem inside each and every one of us. According to Carl, when we're in the womb, we have no bacteria in us at all, but as soon as we're born we start gathering up ...

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Guts

Monday, April 02, 2012

This hour, we dive into the messy mystery in the middle of us. What's going on down there? And what can the rumblings deep in our bellies tell us about ourselves?

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The Cell That Started a Pandemic

Monday, November 14, 2011

In the early 1980s, epidemiologists were racing to understand a mysterious disease that was killing young men in California. As we now know, that disease was AIDS. And it soon grew into one of the biggest global pandemics in human history. But back in 1984, no one knew what it ...

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Patient Zero

Monday, November 14, 2011

Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes from all over the map.

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Sleepless in South Sudan

Monday, October 31, 2011

Carl Zimmer is one of our go-to guys when we need help untangling a complicated scientific idea. But in this short, he unravels something much more personal.

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Move Over Blood Type, Gut Bacteria Is Here

Thursday, April 21, 2011

For two decades, scientists and doctors have relied on blood types to categorize patients. Depending on whether one is blood type A, B, AB, or O, doctors could alter their treatment to increase their chances of a successful procedure. But there's a new way for people to be categorized medically — gut bacteria. New research shows that there are three distinct ecosystems in people's guts that could have direct effects of people's heath. We talk with Carl Zimmer, science reporter for our partner The New York Times, who reported on this story in yesterday's paper.

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The Science of Smiling

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Carl Zimmer, contributor to The New York Times' Science Times and author of Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind, talks about developments in the research of smiling and what smiling means for our brains.

President Obama's smile was impressively consistent when he posed for photographs with 130 foreign dignitaries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009.  Check out the video below, from Bus Your Own Tray blogger Eric Spiegelman.

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Scientists Crack a Smile

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Why do we smile? Not only do scientists believe they may have discovered the answer to that question, but also to how we perceive the smile. Carl Zimmer, science writer for The New York Times, has the details of this new study to be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

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The Good Show

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

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An Equation for Good

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

In a brief snippet from a conversation Robert had with Richard Dawkins at the 92 Street Y in New York City, we learn that natural selection is often a brutal arms race, inherently full of suffering and cruelty. But if Darwin's big idea is really predicated on pain and selfishness, ...

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Parasites

Monday, September 07, 2009

What's gotten into you? In this hour of Radiolab: encounters with parasites. Tales of lethargic farmers, zombie cockroaches, and even mind-controlled humans (kinda, maybe).

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Climate Change and Evolution

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Increasing temperatures on the planet might mean catastrophe for some species -- including humans -- but it might present new opportunities for others. Science writer Carl Zimmer explains why researchers believe that some species are already adapting to a warmer world. You can read his article here.

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The Secret (Love) Life of Fireflies

Tuesday, June 30, 2009


Summer brings warm evenings dotted by the light of fireflies. The apparently serene scene is full of murder, deception, and secret trysts as the fireflies communicate with each other and try to mate. Joining The Takeaway with more on the passionate life of the firefly is science writer Carl Zimmer. You can read Zimmer's New York Times article on fireflies in today's Science Times, "Blink Twice if You Like Me".

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Stochasticity

Monday, June 15, 2009

Stochasticity is a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness. This hour of Radiolab: making sense of the patterns we see-- from lucky streaks to gambling odds, to two girls named Laura.

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Rethinking the roles of genes

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

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