Painting by Louis Agassi Fuertes/National Geographic

Catching up: A Hundred Years Without Passenger Pigeons, and the Secrets of the Puppet Masters

ByCarl Zimmer
August 31, 2014

If you’re looking for something to read this weekend, here are a couple pieces I’ve written in the past few days:

1. Epigenetics are cool. Mind-controlling parasites are cool. Epigenetics+mind-controlling parasites=Very cool. That equation is the subject of my latest column for the New York Times.

2. Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. In honor of that event, I’ve written a piece for National Geographic News about why its demise still means so much to scientists a century later.

For more on the passenger pigeon, check out this previous post from the Loom, as well as this feature I wrote last year for National Geographic. A number of other writers are also marking tomorrow’s anniversary–for example, Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker,  David Biello at Scientific American, and John Fitzpatrick in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times.

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