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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).

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, ...

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.

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".