Not Exactly Rocket Science
Ed Yong
Science in the Media: Rude or Ailing Health?
Posted by Ed Yong on March 10, 2010 If anyone’s in London or thereabouts on the 31st of March, come and see me and a few other science journalists discuss the state of science in the media at City University. The discussion follows a recent government report, entitled Science in the Media: Securing the Future. The report declared that science coverage (in the…
DNA from the largest bird ever sequenced from fossil eggshells
Posted by Ed Yong on March 9, 2010 Even extinction and the passing of millennia are no barriers to clever geneticists. In the past few years, scientists have managed to sequence the complete genome of a prehistoric human and produced “first drafts” of the mammoth and Neanderthal genomes. More controversially, some groups have even recovered DNA from dinosaurs. Now, a variety of extinct…
Pocket Science – chameleons hunt with cold-proof tongues and zebrafish babies go blind at night
Posted by Ed Yong on March 9, 2010 Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes by the world’s best journalists and bloggers. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog. Cold-proof tongue allows early chameleon to catch early insect Chameleons are some…
Pay it forward? Cooperative behaviour spreads through a group, but so does cheating
Posted by Ed Yong on March 8, 2010 Ever wonder if acts of kindness or malice really do ripple outwards? If you give up a seat on a train to a stranger, do they go onto “pay it forward” to others? Likewise, if you steal someone’s seat, does the bad mood you engender topple over to other people like a set of malicious…
Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
Posted by Ed Yong on March 7, 2010 Sex might be fun but it’s not without risks. As your partner exposes themselves to you, they also expose you to whatever bacteria, viruses or parasites they might be carrying. But some animals have a way around that. Ekaterina Litvinova has found that when male mice get a whiff of female odours, their immune systems…
Pocket Science – when enslaved bacteria go bad, gut microbes and fat mice, and stretchy beards of iron
Posted by Ed Yong on March 5, 2010 The Not Exactly Pocket Science experiment continues after the vast majority of people who commented liked the pilot post. I’m really enjoying this, for quite unexpected reasons. It’s forcing me to flex writing muscles that usually don’t get much of a workout. Writing short pieces means being far more economical with language and detail than…
Beer makes humans more attractive to malarial mosquitoes
Posted by Ed Yong on March 4, 2010 We’ve all heard about “beer goggles”, the mythical, invisible eyewear that makes everyone else seem incredibly attractive after a few pints too many. If only beer had the reverse effect, making the drinker seem irresistibly attractive. Well, the good news is that beer does actually do this. The bad news is that the ones who…
The bacterial zoo in your bowel
Posted by Ed Yong on March 3, 2010 You are outnumbered by a factor of 10 to one, by forces you cannot see. Your body has around ten trillion cells, but it’s also home to a hundred trillion bacteria. For every gene in your genome, there are 100 bacterial ones. Most of these are found the dark, dank environment of your bowel but…
Zombie hands to bird wings – the evolution of the dinosaur wrist
Posted by Ed Yong on March 3, 2010 Hold your arms out with your palm oriented vertically, as if you were trying to shake someone’s hand. Now without moving your forearm, bend your hand downwards towards the floor. Unless you are freakishly flexible, you will only have managed to a measly acute angle. But if you were a bird, you could bend your…
Not Exactly Pocket Science – panic aboard the Titanic, the rise of polar bears and emasculated frogs
Posted by Ed Yong on March 2, 2010 I’m trying something new. Right from the start, I’ve always tried to write fairly long and detailed write-ups of new papers but this means that on any given week, there are always more stories than time and my desktop gets littered with PDFs awaiting interpretation. So, I’m going to start doing shorter write-ups of papers…