England’s King George III descended into mental chaos, or what at the time was called madness, in 1789. Physicians could not say whether he would recover or if a replacement should assume the throne.

Luckily, acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer is here to unravel the tangled history of the science and pseudoscience surrounding heredity, in all its many forms. In his expansive, engrossing, and ...

The worst scares of my life have usually come in unfamiliar places. I still panic a bit when I remember traveling into a Sumatran jungle only to discover my brother, Ben, had dengue fever. I lose a ...

Humans have a positive view of nature. But is this due to an approach we have learned while growing up, or is it something we are born with? The answer is 'Both', according to researchers. Humans have ...

Two hundred years ago, biologists did not recognize that there was such a thing as 'heredity'. By the 1830s, however, insights from medicine and agriculture had indicated that something is passed from ...

It is a common belief that mental illness runs in families. While it is true that heredity plays a role, in reality, the vast majority of cases—such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and ...

Our concept of heredity is based on the idea that we inherit certain genes and traits from our parents and ancestors. But as science writer Carl Zimmer points out in his new book, it's not that simple ...

The Elephant Man, novelist Pearl S. Buck and Phoebus, god of the sun, all find their way into science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book. In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Zimmer uses famous moments in ...

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