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December 27, 2006
Fellow scienceblogger Coturnix is assembling some posts about science for an anthology. He's been asking for people to contribute suggestions. I've been meaning to thumb through my old posts in order to send one over, but it's been more of a challenge than I thought. Part of the problem is that…
December 25, 2006
All I want for Christmas is a lying frog and a bubble-sniffing mole.
For those who want to head for the original papers, check out:
1. "Why Animals Lie: How Dishonesty and Belief Can Coexist in a Signaling System" (free full text)
2. "Underwater 'sniffing' by semi-aquatic mammals"
Happy Holidays!…
December 18, 2006
The manuscript clock is still ticking, and so, in lieu of true blogging, let me direct your attention to another article of mine. This time it's the cover story in the December issue of Discover. Discover chose Jay Keasling as their scientist of the year and asked me to interview him. Keasling,…
December 15, 2006
My radio silence is the result of a perfect storm--reporting trips, upcoming holidays, and the minor matter of my deadline for turning in my book at the end of the year. Any free moment gets gobbled up before I can even think about blogging. But I can point you to some pieces of mine that are now…
December 4, 2006
Thanks to PZ Myers for calling attention to this superb video of Corydceps, a parasitic fungus that drives its insect host up a plant before growing a spike out of its head. Leave it to David Attenborough, master of the nature documentary, to bring the beauty of this parasite to video. I've seen…
November 19, 2006
Well, it's been worth the wait. The week-long attack from the intelligent design crowd on me explodes in a final fireball of absurdity. Read more in the final update of my response to the Pinto-loving Discovery Institute.
November 16, 2006
The Discovery Institute has fired a second post at me and my National Geographic article on evolution. I've updated my post to explain why they're shooting blanks.
In the comment thread, some people asked why I was wasting time dealing with this stuff. The reason is simple: if I don't show why…
November 14, 2006
Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you're in luck. Cornell has put the video of the talk online. The image is pretty small on the…
November 13, 2006
Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well.…
November 7, 2006
Attention all Loom readers in the Cornell University area: I'm heading up to Ithaca to give a talk tomorrow on a subject near and dear to my heart--how parasites turn their hosts into puppets and slaves. I'll be at the David Call auditorium in Kennedy Hall at 4 pm. The lecture is open to the public…
November 7, 2006
A while back I blogged about the tens of thousands of viruses we carry in our genomes. In today's New York Times I write about how scientists reconstructed a working ancestral virus from its disabled descendants: Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA.
Here's the original paper.
October 26, 2006
Just an update to my post about talking this weekend at the National Association of Science Writers meeting: in addition to the panel I was originally scheduled to join--on book publicity--I've also been added to a panel talk on Friday afternoon called "Navigating the New Media." I'm subbing for…
October 25, 2006
To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species to sequence next. With millions of species to choose from, they…
October 22, 2006
I'll be speaking on Saturday at the National Association of Science Writers annual meeting in Baltimore. I'll be discussing how writers can publicize science books in the age of the Internet. It's a subject I'm still figuring out for myself, so I won't be dispensing advice so much as sharing…
October 20, 2006
Martin Schaefer, one of the scientists I wrote about in my recent post on autumn leaves, has joined the comment thread and kindly answered some questions about his work. Check it out.
October 18, 2006
Flowers, flagella, feathers. Life is rife with complex features--structures and systems made up of many interacting parts. National Geographic magazine asked me to take a tour of complexity in life and report on the latest research on how it evolved. What struck me over and over again was how…
October 18, 2006
This fall we've had some rude visitors out by the front door. One morning a strangely foul smell wafted through the windows. When we looked outside for a dead animal, we found nothing. But we noticed some downright obscene growths foisting themselves out of the flower beds. Thus I got my first…
October 17, 2006
As the autumn leaves turn handsomely, I've been wondering, why do trees bother? It's a question scientists have been asking for the past few years, and for the first time, they've carried out an experiment to find out.
The color of an autumn leaf can actually take a lot of work. In the fall, the…
October 13, 2006
Galileo discovered Saturn's rings, but called them ears. If only he could see what Cassini sees.
Cue kettledrums...
October 12, 2006
Toxoplasma, that mind-altering, cell-manipulating, all-around awesome parasite that sits in the brains of billions of us, is back in the news. Infection with the parasite raises the chances a woman will have a boy from 51% to 72%. The average ratio of boys to girls at birth is 51%. Women with high…
October 10, 2006
The Seed in-house blog, Page 3.14 has been running Q & A's with some of its bloggers. Mine's up now.
October 8, 2006
Two years ago this month, I was taken aback by some explosive news. A team of Indonesian and Australian scientists reported that they had discovered fossils of what they claimed was a new species of hominid. It lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia, it stood three feet tall, and it had a brain…
October 2, 2006
This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the…
September 28, 2006
PZ Myers did an excellent job yesterday of dismantling the latest from intelligent-design advocate Jonathan Wells. Wells wrote a piece on WorldNetDaily called "Why Darwinism is Doomed." It is based some new research identifying an important gene involved in the human brain--which I blogged about…
September 26, 2006
I always like to consider questions of the day from the perspective of deep time. How hot is it these days? Look back 1.35 million years, and you can see it's pretty hot. Here's a chart, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (free paper here). It combines…
September 22, 2006
Last week I caught some of the talks at this year's Dwight H. Terry Lecture at Yale. The lectures are in their hundredth year, and this time around the topic was "The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue?" The speakers include Ken MIller, talking about his experience at the Dover…
September 19, 2006
Congratulations to the new crop of Macarthur genius grant winners, including Ken Catania, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University whose muse is the star-nosed mole. It turns out that a single strange animal can reveal a lot about how nervous systems develop and evolve. For more on Catania's work…
September 18, 2006
Over the weekend I wrote about the natural history of the Escherichia coli strain that has contaminated spinach. According to reports today, 109 people have been identified as sickened with Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one has died. In the comment thread of my post, the subject of antibiotics…
September 17, 2006
I'm gearing up for some autumn talks. First up: Notre Dame University University of Notre Dame. The title of the talk is, "The Darwin Beat: Reporting on Evolution in a Controversial Age."
When: Thursday, September 21, 4 pm.
Where: Jordan Hall Auditorium, Rm. 101
More information here.
I'll let you…
September 15, 2006
Don't eat your spinach.
That's the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number…