deer mice

Image of a deer mouse from Seney Natural History Association, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29576617 Deer mice are known for being quite promiscuous. In fact, it is not uncommon to find a litter of deer mice with multiple fathers. Dr. Hopi Hoekstra and colleagues at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology discovered that the tail of deer mice sperm have longer midsections than found in monogamous mice. What this means is that their sperm can swim better and faster, thereby reaching an egg sooner than sperm from other…
Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion. The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…