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Click here for Part One: Carl Zimmer on the Art of Science Writing
??"Carl Zimmer" by Nathaniel Gold
Carl Zimmer has an uncanny knack for getting under your skin, quite literally. While travelling through the village of Tumbura in southern Sudan he encountered invisible monsters that live inside the subcutaneous tissue of their innocent victims. Under a microscope these creatures, known as Onchocerca volvulus, resemble coiled worms. As they crawl through your flesh they provoke an immune response that leaves an itchy rash all over. People have been known to scratch themselves to death. Later, they crawl through the outer layer of your eyes causing blindness. In Tumbura nearly everyone over the age of 40 had gone blind as a result of these parasites.
This is just one of nature?s bizarre creations that Zimmer has spent more than a decade exploring. His writing projects, whether in books like Parasite Rex and Soul Made Flesh, at his award-winning blog, or in regular features for The New York Times, are as fascinating and provocative as the subjects he covers. He is, at the same time, the busiest science writer working today and the one who most consistently pushes boundaries to communicate science in a way you?ve never experienced before.
As shown in part one of this interview, Carl Zimmer has entertained and informed readers for more than a decade. His latest books, all released this year, have found new ways to get under the skin of readers. A Planet of Viruses examines the fascinating world of virology and delves to new levels in the world of the very small. Meanwhile, Science Ink explores the tattoo art of the science obsessed and illustrates the passions that drive scientists to search just beneath the surface of current knowledge. His two e-books, Brain Cuttings and the aptly titled More Brain Cuttings, dig deep into his unpublished archives to expose nature?s marvels to the light of electronic paper. It is a collection of work that reveals just how fortunate we are to have a science writer like Carl who possesses such passion and efficiency.
Planet of Viruses is Zimmer's third book on microbiology after Microcosm and Parasite Rex.
Eric Michael Johnson: You?ve been extremely prolific this year. You?ve published two e-books and two hardcover books, one of which is called A Planet of Viruses. It reads almost like a collection of love letters about some of your favorite infectious pathogens. Influenza, West Nile, Ebola, smallpox; each get their own chapter where you emphasize the wonder and mystery of what most people would consider a scourge on humanity. You even write about how if you close your eyes and say the word aloud, ?influenza? sounds lovely. I think you?re right. This is your third book on microscopic parasites. What is it about this topic that you find so fascinating?
Carl Zimmer: There?s something endlessly fascinating in biology about the fact that there?s this huge invisible world of things that are incredibly important and sophisticated and highly evolved but that we don?t think about much in our daily life. My first way of exploring that was with my book Parasite Rex. Then, a few years later, I was thinking a lot about the old question ?What is life?? I was fascinated by how scientists were starting to address this question in some very specific ways. They were able to start laying out an organism?s entire network of genes and show how they interact. It occurred to me that most of this work had been done with just one species of bacteria, E. coli. Most people, if they?ve heard of E. coli, just think that it?s something they should avoid in their hamburger. And yet, in a lot of ways, modern biology is built on this organism. That was the inspiration for my other book Microcosm.
What was funny then is that I didn?t think I could get much more microscopic. But recently I was invited to get involved in an education program about viruses. What I started to do was write essays about individual viruses and try to use these essays to talk about some general developments in this whole science of virology. I was really quite floored by the things I was discovering. For example, there are 10 to the power of 31 viruses on Earth, or 1 followed by 31 zeros. That?s way beyond any other kind of life form. I also discovered that the majority of the genetic diversity on Earth is in the genes of viruses. It was astonishing to me. There was this whole world of viruses that I hadn?t fully appreciated. Now I think that virology is really the most exciting branch of science these days. There is so much that?s happening.
Johnson: There is a certain irony that your second hardcover book published this year could, if it?s done incorrectly, actually be the cause of infectious disease.
Zimmer: [Laughs]
Johnson: With Science Ink, what was the biggest surprise as you began receiving the hundreds of photographs of scientifically-inspired tattoo art?
Zimmer: I just think the fact there were hundreds of pieces of scientific tattoo art was surprising in itself. I had no idea this would happen. I just noticed one neuroscientist with a DNA tattoo on his shoulder and I took a picture of it to post on my blog. With it I just asked an open question about whether there were other scientists out there. I thought it was funny enough that there was just one. Then, lo and behold, there were actually hundreds upon hundreds of people with these tattoos. But what became interesting was how much these tattoos could tell. A lot of times people would get tattoos about the science that they studied. Maybe it was a particular type of neuron that they did their PhD on, or it was the mathematical equation that governs all their research. It was this totally different way of probing the passions of scientists.
Zimmer announcing the release of Science Ink on social media. / Carl Zimmer 2011
Johnson: I suspect the word ?scientist? brings to mind a very specific image for most people, one that probably doesn?t include someone with a tattoo that covers their entire back. Throughout your work you have sought to bring science home and emphasize that scientists are largely doing what we all do. They?re sorting out the ideas that work from the ones that don?t, just at a more precise level. It?s what the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley called ?organized common sense.? Are you concerned about the public perception of scientists, and science more generally? How does this factor into your work?
Zimmer: I think that, for the most part, people feel that scientists are some other species. They don?t know scientists personally and largely just read about what they do or see them on TV. There?s definitely a gulf there. I think it can be a valuable thing to show scientists as they are, as human beings.
In a sense what I try to do in all my writing is to help readers become better scientists themselves. If you?re walking through the woods and you happen to see some weird little colored blobs on a log you might just walk past and not think about it at all. But those are what are known as slime molds. If you?re a scientist that studies slime molds they turn out to be immensely fascinating things, some even spend their entire lives studying them. So when I write about slime molds I want readers to become curious so that the next time they?re out in the woods they?ll stop and take a closer look. I want them thinking about the same questions that the scientists are asking. What is this thing? Is there a weird intelligence to this blob as it probes around on the forest floor and sucks up food? Does this slime mold tell me something about how my own ancestors came on land? So, to answer your question, yes, public perception is an important concern for me.
Johnson: There are now so many new ways to communicate science directly with the public. Blogs, social media, and now e-books have offered a unique interaction between writer and audience. You have already been blogging and tweeting for many years, but 2011 marked your first exploration into e-book publishing with your collection of essays entitled Brain Cuttings. In all of these different mediums do you find the message itself changes? What would be your advice for writers looking at the diversity of options available to them?
Zimmer: My advice at this point would just be to experiment and to find things that work well for you as a writer. I just came out with a second collection of pieces called More Brain Cuttings. It?s not a very exciting title. [Laughs] But after doing two of these things now I still don?t feel that I have the answers sorted out. It?s been interesting to experiment with this and it?s been nice to create another way for people to read some of my stuff, but I think there a lot of serious questions about whether science e-books will be particularly successful as a way for reaching people. There are still a whole lot of stumbling blocks put in people?s way and we?ve got to keep experimenting and figuring those things out.
That being said, I guess my advice would be that the goal of science writers should not be to become a science journalist circa 1980. That doesn?t exist anymore. A lot of people may mourn the loss of that kind of science writing, when staff writers on city newspapers and magazines would produce regular articles. There was a lot of good that came out of that model, but the fact is that it?s gone. What?s taken its place is very chaotic. But I think that for people who want to experiment and play around with software or genres, they can help to discover something brand new about how to write about science.
Carl Zimmer with biologists Niles Eldredge, Paul Roossin, and Rick Lipkin / Josh Rosenau 2010, Flickr
Johnson: With the advent of blogs there developed a now well-established genre of doomsaying about the future of books and long form writing in general. Do you give any credence to those who bemoan what is sometimes called ?short attention span theater? (and, if you could, please answer in 140 characters or less)?
Zimmer: [Laughs] Yeah, right. There has been a lot of doomsaying and I think that the most extreme doomsayers need to retract everything they?ve said. It?s just not true. People are still reading books. Maybe a quarter of them are reading these books on their phones, but they?re still reading books. There?s a whole flourishing niche of what people call #longreads where people will write pieces that are thousands of words long and put them online. You have places like The Atavist putting out really long reads that are 20,000-30,000 words. They?re not long enough to be conventional books but they?re way too long to be traditional magazine pieces and people are snapping them up.
I think people were just so scared of all the new possibilities that were opening up that they were sure it was all going to end badly. Of course there?s a lot of garbage out there. I?m not going to dispute that. As readers we have to discipline ourselves about how we read. There?s always something vaguely interesting just another click away and we have to structure our time if we don?t want to get swept along in a flood. But that?s different than saying that long form writing is dead.
The flip-side of that is Twitter. For the life of me I can?t understand people carping about Twitter. They keep getting confused between the system and what people are writing on it. The fact that you can only write 140 characters does not mean that, by default, everything people write on it is unimportant. I?ve literally seen people say, ?Everyone tells me as a journalist that I need to be on Twitter, but I don?t want to be writing about what I ate for breakfast.? No one?s forcing you to tell us what you ate for breakfast on Twitter. You could actually look at it as an experiment or an opportunity to be creative, a way to distill things down to very short and sweet statements. It?s like bemoaning haikus by saying that they?re so short and it will be the death of poetry. That would be exactly the same thing. It?s just silly.
Johnson: This seems to tie in with the old debate about whether blogging is journalism. Are you optimistic about what blogging has done for the profession?
Zimmer: Absolutely, that debate is over. Let me give you a personal example. I was asked to give a talk last year at a scientific conference. It was very intimidating because I?m a journalist and here I was being asked to stand up in front of a bunch of scientists. I had no idea what I was supposed to say. What I decided to do was to take advantage of the strength that we science writers have, which is that we?re not stuck in one tiny sub-specialty. We move around, we talk to lots of different people, and we can see connections sometimes that they might miss. My talk was addressing people who were working on genome sequencing and looking for important patterns that might lead to the development of drugs or identify the causes of disease. I tried to get them to think like ecologists. I explained that health is an ecosystem, it?s not whether we have a particular gene or not. I developed this talk about all the microbes that live in us, the microbiome, and I thought it worked out pretty well.
But afterwards I felt very depressed. I worked so hard on this talk, I?d spoken to several hundred people, but then that was it. It was over. I really wanted to give this an extra life, so I sat down and started writing. I wrote everything down and even inserted some of my slides. This was not something that would have worked as a magazine piece. So I just stuck the whole thing, all five thousand words, up on my blog. I know there are people that would say this is too long for a blog post. But it became one of my most read posts of the entire year. The journalist Steve Silberman picked it as one of his five favorite longform pieces of 2011 and it?s going to be my contribution to the book Open Laboratory, the annual anthology of science blogging. So, for me personally, this gibberish about the death of long form writing is just that. It?s gibberish. This is a wonderful time to be a writer and there are endless opportunities to explore and innovate. It?s a lot of fun.
Click here for Part One: Carl Zimmer on the Art of Science Writing
Previous Interviews at The Primate Diaries:
? Frans de Waal on Political Apes and Building a Cooperative Society
? Lee Alan Dugatkin on Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism, and Cooperation in Nature
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=9dfccc30903f10a7063ec25fb076f096
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An Egyptian young protester brandishes blood on his hands, near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Troops and protesters are clashing for the third straight day in Cairo, pelting each other with rocks in skirmishes near parliament in the heart of the Egyptian capital. (AP Photo)
An Egyptian young protester brandishes blood on his hands, near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Troops and protesters are clashing for the third straight day in Cairo, pelting each other with rocks in skirmishes near parliament in the heart of the Egyptian capital. (AP Photo)
An Egyptian military solider throws a rock toward protesters near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Troops and protesters are clashing for the third straight day in Cairo, pelting each other with rocks in skirmishes near parliament in the heart of the Egyptian capital. (AP Photo/Ahmed Ali)
Protesters throw rocks toward Egyptian military in front of the former building of the American University of Cairo, left, near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Troops and protesters are clashing for the third straight day in Cairo, pelting each other with rocks in skirmishes near parliament in the heart of the Egyptian capital. (AP Photo/Ahmed Ali)
A man walks inside the recently burnt research center set up during the three-year occupation of Egypt by France in the late 18th century near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Troops and protesters are clashing for the third straight day in Cairo, pelting each other with rocks in skirmishes near parliament in the heart of the Egyptian capital. (AP Photo)
Egyptian protesters protect themselves as they throw stones during clashes with army troops near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011. Troops and protesters are clashing for the third straight day in Cairo, pelting each other with rocks in skirmishes near parliament in the heart of the Egyptian capital. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abu Zaid)
CAIRO (AP) ? Egypt's ruling military and the revolutionaries who demand they immediately step down battled for a third day in the streets on Sunday ? and competed fiercely for the support of a broader public that has grown tired of turmoil since the fall of Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago.
The generals appear to be winning the fight for the public, despite a heavy-handed crackdown on protesters around Cairo's Tahrir Square using a roughness that rivaled even that of Mubarak's widely hated police force.
Before dawn Monday, security forces mounted a charge and cleared hundreds of demonstrators away from the area, according to videos posted on the internet.
The protesters have tried to drum up Egyptians' anger at the military by spreading videos and photos of military police savagely beating young men and women to the ground with sticks and truncheons ? and the resonant scene of a woman in a conservative headscarf being stripped half naked by soldiers who stomp on her chest.
But so far their efforts to win public sympathy don't seem to be gaining traction in the face of the military's campaign to depict the crowds of hundreds in the streets as hooligans and vandals, not the idealistic activists who succeeded in bringing down Mubarak. At least 10 protesters have been killed and 441 others wounded in the three days of violence, according to the Health Ministry.
"The military has failed in everything except for its stunning success in making people hate the revolution, its history and its revolutionaries," prominent columnist Ibrahim Eissa wrote in an editorial in the independent pro-revolution newspaper, Al-Tahrir.
Led by a general who served for 20 years as Mubarak's defense minister, the military has been methodically seeking to discredit the revolutionaries, accusing them of illegally receiving foreign funds and being part of a plot hatched abroad to destabilize Egypt. The generals have in the meantime sought to portray themselves as key players in the 18-day revolt that toppled Mubarak's 29-year rule and hence have earned the right to rule.
In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the ruling military council on Sunday called the clashes part of a "conspiracy" against Egypt. It said its forces had the right to defend the "property of the great people of Egypt."
Seeking to depict the protesters as hooligans ? and apparently to counter the widely published images of protesters being beaten or dragged on the ground ? it also posted on the page footage of young men throwing rocks at a basement window of the parliament building and of at least one man trying to set the place ablaze.
The generals' campaign plays on Egyptians' frustration with continued instability and economic woes since Mubarak's fall. Many are now more focused on the multistage parliamentary elections that began last month and continue through March. Islamist parties have so far overwhelmingly dominated the vote, with liberals and secular parties far behind.
That trend continued with the announcement Sunday of results from the second of three rounds of voting, held last week. Out of around 160 seats up for grabs in the second round, the Muslim Brotherhood won 29 and another more conservative Islamic party, Al-Nour, won 23. Two liberal groups ? the Wafd Party and the Egyptian Bloc ? won nine and seven seats, respectively. The rest will be determined in a run-off vote to be held later this week.
The Islamists have been staying clear of the recent violence, fearing that they could jeopardize their electoral gains by taking part in the protests. Their stance has prompted many activists to accuse them of political opportunism.
The military has meanwhile been using the state media and sympathetic private TV stations to market an image of itself as the protector of the nation, filling its statements with patriotic rhetoric and grave warnings if turmoil persists.
The revolutionaries who led the protests against Mubarak accuse the military of mismanaging the transition since then, of seeking to hold on to power and of using the same autocratic ways as the ousted leader. They demand that the military hand over power to civilians immediately ? and some have begun demanding that presidential elections scheduled for the middle of next year be moved up to January to pick a civilian head of state to take the generals' place.
"The military is looking down at us and handling everything from a security perspective," said Shady el-Ghazali Harb, a prominent activist and an icon of the anti-Mubarak uprising. "It is trying to make the point that its way of handling things is what will be applied and nothing else."
The latest deadly clashes began Friday, when one of several hundred peaceful protesters staging a sit-in outside the Cabinet offices near parliament was detained and beaten by troops. The protesters began their sit-in three weeks ago to demand that the military immediately step down.
In Sunday's clashes, protesters and troops battled on two main streets off Tahrir Square, trading volleys of stones and firebombs around barriers that the military set up to block the two central avenues. The army also used water canons.
Human rights lawyer Ahmed Ragheb said the man who died Sunday, Mohammed Mohie Hussein, was among some 200 people being held in a Cairo court after being arrested at the clashes. Within an hour of his interrogation in the presence of several defense lawyers, he died, Ragheb said.
"His condition deteriorated in custody. He was already wounded when he got there," he said.
Activists have flooded social network sites and sympathetic media with photos and video from the troops' brutal assaults the past two days.
The photo of the woman protester half-stripped by soldiers ran on the front page of the Al-Tahrir newspaper, emblazoned with a headline in red, "Liars," referring to repeated denials by the military council and military-appointed Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri that no force or live ammunition were used against the protesters.
The presenter of a political talk show on a private TV station sarcastically praised the soldiers for their bravery in wrestling the woman down.
"She is more of a man than 300,000 men put together, including me," said Youssef al-Hussein on ONTV.
Other widely circulating footage show an army officer firing a pistol at protesters ? though it is not clear whether he was using live ammunition ? and soldiers dragging women by the hair and ferociously beating, kicking and stomping on protesters cowering on the ground.
Still, many Egyptians complain the revolutionaries have gone too far and that, almost a year after ousting Mubarak, they should now go home and let the military run the country or wait for the next parliament to decide the country's future.
Such sentiments are not surprising given that the military has been the most powerful institution in Egypt since army officers seized power in a 1952 coup that toppled the monarchy.
Nearly 60 years later, the military continues to have the last word on policies, a position of power that has left many activists not entirely certain that the generals who succeeded Mubarak would voluntarily return to their barracks.
"The military council uses every opportunity to show itself as the land's strongest institution," said Mohammed Abbas, an activist who defected from the Muslim Brotherhood to side with youth groups more active in protests. "We are making it easier for the generals by our divisions and isolation."
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TRIPOLI, Libya ? U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Tripoli Saturday, taking advantage of the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi in an eight-month civil war to become the first Pentagon chief to set foot on Libyan soil.
But Panetta has indicated that the U.S. will give more time to the Libyans to gain control of the militias that overthrew Gadhafi before determining how to help the fledgling government.
At a news conference with Libyan Prime Minister Abd al-Raheem al-Keeb, Panetta said that he was confident that the new Libyan government is reaching out to all of the disparate groups and would bring them together so they will be part of "one Libya." Panetta, who was joined by Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, said the United States would provide whatever assistance the Libyans needed.
The Libyan prime minister told reporters that he was optimistic that they will be able to deal with the militias.
Panetta's route into the city on Saturday took him past lush orange groves, carcasses of bombed buildings and the charred and graffiti-covered compound once occupied by Gadhafi. Flying from rooftops were the green, black and red flags, adorned with a star and a crescent, belonging to the new government. Amid the Arabic graffiti splashed across the walls of the compound was a short comment in English: "Thanx US/UK."
Panetta will meet with members of the transitional government in Tripoli, and make an emotional visit to what historians believe is the gravesite of 13 U.S. sailors killed in 1804. Those deaths were caused by the explosion of the U.S. ship Intrepid, which was slipping into the Tripoli harbor to destroy pirate ships that had captured an American frigate.
While eager to encourage a new democracy that emerged from Libya's Arab Spring revolution, the U.S. is wary of appearing as trying to exert too much influence after an eight-month civil war. At the same time, however, leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere worry about how well the newly formed National Transitional Council can resolve clashes between militia groups in the North African nation.
Ahead of Panetta's visit, the Obama administration announced it had lifted sanctions the U.S. imposed on Libya in February to choke off the Gadhafi regime's funds while it was violent suppressing peaceful protests. The U.S. at the time blocked some $37 billion in Libyan assets, and a White House statement said Friday's action "unfreezes all government and central bank funds within U.S. jurisdiction, with limited exceptions."
Recovery of the assets "will allow the Libyan government to access most of its worldwide holdings and will help the new government oversee the country's transition and reconstruction in a responsible manner," the White House said.
But the continuing violence in Libya, including recent skirmishes between revolutionary fighters and national army troops near Tripoli's airport, reflects the difficulties that Libya's leaders face as they try to forge an army, integrating some of the militias and disarming the rest.
Officials acknowledge that process could take months, and that they can't force the militias to go along.
Panetta told reporters Friday that his visit to the Libyan capital will give him a better sense of the situation and allow him to pay tribute to the people for bringing down Gadhafi and trying to establish a democratic government.
"It seems to me they are working through some very difficult issues to try to bring that country together," said Panetta. "It's not going to be easy. This is not a country that has a tradition of democratic institutions and representative government. This is going to take some work "
But he said he has seen indications that the Libyans are making progress.
"I think that any country like Libya that was able to do what they did and show the courage that they did in making the changes that took place there ? I'm confident that ultimately they're going to be able to succeed in putting a democracy together," he said.
Panetta said the U.S. is prepared to provide Libya any assistance it needs.
By traveling to Libya, however, Panetta was highlighting the different approaches that the U.S. and other countries are taking with respect to rebellions against tyrannical leaders.
The U.S. and NATO provided months of military power and assistance to the Libyan rebels, but officials have made it clear they do not intend to do the same in Syria despite the furor over President Bashar Assad's crackdown on pro-reform demonstrators.
Panetta, who met with Turkish officials Friday, said they did not discuss any specific steps to increase pressure on Assad to step down.
But they talked about the need to work together with other nations to "get Assad to do the right thing."
At some point, he said, he believes that the type of uprisings that happened in Libya and elsewhere across the Middle East will take place in Syria.
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(Reuters) ? Tim Tebow, the most-talked about quarterback in the National Football League, goes up against one of the most successful of the past decade when the Denver Broncos host Tom Brady and the New England Patriots in Sunday's marquee game.
The game is one of many this week with playoff implications as the NFL enters the final three weeks of regular season play, but no matchup is more keenly anticipated than the clash of two AFC divisional leaders.
The AFC East's Patriots need a win to clinch their place in the post-season while the AFC West's Broncos are desperate for a victory to keep their momentum towards the playoffs going after winning seven of eight games since Tebow was named starter.
Tebow, the unorthodox, college-style quarterback whose very public displays of religiosity have polarized opinion and whose technique led many critics to write him off as a pro, has simply been the story of the 2011 NFL season so far.
The 24-year-old signal caller is well aware his counterpart in Sunday's game represents, in many ways, the gold standard in the NFL. After all, Brady has won three Super Bowls, was named the most valuable player in two of the championship games and has earned six Pro Bowl selections.
"He's a master of so many things at the quarterback position," said Tebow. "He's been one of the best in the league for a long time."
Denver have adapted their offense to embrace Tebow's ability to run with the ball while compensating for his limited throwing ability, and their defense has ensured the quarterback has been in a position to launch a series of late-game comebacks.
Denver have won their previous six games, three of them in overtime, including last week's win over the Chicago Bears that marked the second time Tebow led the Broncos to victory after trailing by 10 or more points in the final three minutes.
The phrase 'Tebow Time' has been coined to capture the fact that five times this year his Broncos have won games in which they trailed in the fourth quarter.
But the latest test for Tebow will be Bill Belichick's experienced and astute New England team, tipped by many to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl.
Belichick knows to expect much more than just the Tebow factor from coach John Fox's Broncos team.
"They do a lot of things well. They run the ball well, they have a little bit of an option game, they throw it well, play-action, thrown the ball down the field to some big receiver who can go up and get it. It's no one man band - we'll get tested across the board," he told reporters.
The Patriots head coach, a three-time Super Bowl winner, also does not buy into the popular notion that Tebow's throwing 'mechanics' are not suited to the NFL.
"His passing is good," said Belichick. "It was good in college, he was a very productive passer in college and he's thrown the ball well in this league. He's got some very good throws, as good as anybody that you want to put in there."
Two other AFC playoff spots could be determined with the Baltimore Ravens needing a win at San Diego to be sure and the Pittsburgh Steelers knowing a win on Monday against the already playoff bound San Francisco 49ers would be enough.
The unbeaten Green Bay Packers already have a bye in the first round of the playoffs and can secure home field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs with a win at the Kansas City Chiefs or a 49ers loss.
(Reporting by Simon Evans in Miami; Editing by Frank Pingue)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/celebrity/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111214/tv_nm/us_nfl
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E-readers for the holidays? Amazon says it has sold 1 million of its various Kindle e-readers during each of the past three weeks.
Amazon says it's selling over 1 million Kindles per week
Skip to next paragraphWith the holiday shopping season in full swing, online retailer Amazon.com Inc. said Thursday that it has been selling more than 1 million of its Kindle devices each of the past three weeks.
The company has never released specific sales figures for the Kindle family, which since the launch of the first Kindle e-reader in 2007 has grown to include a number of e-readers and a tablet computer called the Kindle Fire.
Dave Limp, Amazon's vice president for the Kindle, said in a statement that the $199 Kindle Fire in particular has been the best-selling product for the past 11 weeks, selling "millions of units." The company began taking orders for the device in late September, and the Kindle Fire started shipping in mid-November.
The Kindle Fire is expected to be one of the first true competitors to Apple Inc.'s iPad, though the iPad is still expected to far outsell other tablets this year. According to Gartner Inc., nearly 64 million tablets will be sold worldwide by the end of the year. Some 73 percent of them will be iPads. By Gartner's estimate, Apple will sell 47 million iPads this year ? a figure it could certainly achieve, given that it sold 25 million of them by the end of September.
Amazon shares rose $2.72, or 1.5 percent, to $182.93 in afternoon trading.
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