loom
Posts by this author
August 26, 2004
If you took a census of life on Earth, you'd probably find that the majority of life forms looked like this. It's a virus known as a bacteriophage, which lives exclusively in bacteria. There are about 10 million phages in every milliliter of coastal sea water. All told, scientists put the total…
August 25, 2004
Spiteful bacteria. Two words you probably haven't heard together. Then again, you probably haven't heard of altruistic bacteria either, but both sorts of microbes are out there--and in many cases in you.
Bacteria lead marvelously complicated social lives. As a group of University of Edinburgh…
August 23, 2004
Marriage, we're told by the president and a lot of other people, can only be between one man and one woman. Anything else would go against thousands of years of tradition and nature itself. If the president's DNA could talk, I think it might disagree.
In the 1980s, geneticists began to study…
August 22, 2004
After a couple months of merciless story deadlines, hard disk crashes, and strange viruses that you only find out about once you have kids, the Loom is creaking back to life. Expect several postings this week. For now, let me direct you to a review I wrote a couple weeks ago for The New York Times…
July 8, 2004
Chris Mooney has just blogged on a depressing new report that came out today that documents how the Bush administration puts politics before science.
July 7, 2004
Could test tube babies be revealing some of the hidden workings of evolution? It's a definite possibility, judging from some recent reports about the balance of males and females.
For several decades, evolutionary biologists have been trying to figure out the forces that set this balance. It…
July 5, 2004
Recently I've been trying to imagine a world without leaves. It's not easy to do at this time of year, when the trees around my house turn my windows into green walls. But a paper published on-line today at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science inspires some effort. A team of English…
July 2, 2004
In 1970, the natural history illustrator Rudolph Zallinger painted a picture of human evolution called "The March of Progress" in which a parade of hominids walked along from left to right, evolving from knuckle-walking ape to tall, spear-carrying Cro-Magnon. The picture is etched in our collective…
June 30, 2004
Our brains are huge, particularly if you take into consideration the relative size of our bodies. Generally, the proportion of brain to body is pretty tight among mammals. But the human brain is seven times bigger than what you'd predict from the size of our body. Six million years ago, hominid…
June 21, 2004
We like to think of boundaries as being clear-cut borders, but at least in the biological world they generally turn out to be fuzzy zones of change. The line between land and sea is my own favorite example. Last summer my wife and I would sometimes take our oldest daughter Charlotte to the beach.…
June 16, 2004
Love demands an explanation. Less than 5% of mammal species live monogamously, with males and females staying together beyond mating, and fathers helping mothers care for babies. We humans aren't the most monogamous species of the bunch, but we're closer to that end of the spectrum than the other…
June 15, 2004
In the New York Times this morning, the poet Diane Ackerman has written an essay about the brain, in which she waxes eloquent about its ability to discern patterns in the world. The essay is distilled from her new book, An Alchemy of the Mind, which I've just reviewed for the Washington Post. I…
June 3, 2004
A press release turned up in the comments for a couple of my posts. While that's not as bad as Viagra-ad spam, it's not in the spirit of blogosphere. If you post a press release, it will be deleted. Post a comment in your own words, and it will stay.
June 3, 2004
One of the most exciting lines of research in evolution today is how parasites have become so good at making us sick. A case in point appears in the latest issue of Genome Biology (full text of paper here). It appears that parasites have stolen one of our best lines of defense and now use it…
June 1, 2004
I always like book reviews that combine books that might not at first seem to have that much in common. In the new issue of Natural History, the neuroscientist Williams Calvin reviews Soul Made Flesh along with The Birth of the Mind, a fascinating book by Gary Marcus of NYU. If you haven't heard of…
June 1, 2004
Do you know who George Williams is? If you don't, let me introduce you to one of the most influential evolutionary biologists ever to ponder natural selection. If you do know who he is, you may still be interested in my article in this week's Science about a symposium that was recently held in…
June 1, 2004
It's strange enough hearing yourself talking on the radio. It's stranger still to see a transcript someone makes of you talking on the radio. Recently I was interviewed about Soul Made Flesh on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's show "All in the Mind." Instead of an audio archive, ABC has posted…
June 1, 2004
I was asked a couple weeks ago to contribute a piece to a special series of articles in Newsweek about the future of Wi-Fi. I must admit that a fair amount of the stuff that's on the Wi-Fi horizon seems a little banal to me. It's nice to know that I will be able to swallow a camera-pill that will…
May 18, 2004
Please accept my apologies for the vile spam comments that keep showing up here. I hope that the folks at Corante and I can find a way to permanently shut down the flow of craven obscenity.
I've been traveling again, and now I'm racing against a slew of deadlines, which leaves precious little time…
May 4, 2004
Jack Szostak, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, is trying to build a new kind of life. It will contain no DNA or proteins. Instead, it will based on RNA, a surprisingly mysterious molecule essential to our own cells. Szostak may reach his goal in a few years. But his creatures wouldn't be…
May 3, 2004
On the east coast, we're bracing for the howling emergence of a massive brood of 17-year cicadas in a couple weeks. Here's a nice piece in the Washington Post about the evolution of this strange life history.
April 22, 2004
There are only a few places on the surface of Earth where you can find really old rocks--and by old, I mean 3.5 billion years old or older. The rest have gotten sucked down into the planet's interior, cooked, scrambled with other rocks, and pushed back up to the growing margins of continental…
April 21, 2004
My book Soul Made Flesh looks at the roots of neuroscience in the 1600s. The first neurologists saw their work as a religious mission; they recognized that it was with the brain that we made moral judgments. In order to finish the book, I looked for living neuroscientists who carry on those early…
April 21, 2004
John Maynard Smith has died.
While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, Id bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. Thats a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned…
April 21, 2004
No, I didnt get hit by a car. Instead, I got hit by your typical crush of deadlines, traveling, and a bout of laryngitis. But tranquility is returning, and Im firing up the blogotron again.
April 3, 2004
This week I am in England to give some talks about Soul Made Flesh, which has just been published here. In addition to talking on the BBC, I'll be talking at Blackwell's in Bristol on Tuesday, and at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University on Wednesday. I've posted details and…
March 29, 2004
I'm in Cambridge at the MIT/Harvard Brain Boot Camp this week, so blogging will be light for a few days.
March 24, 2004
A great blog is born: The Panda's Thumb is a multi-authored blog that blasts a firehose of reason at distortions of evolution.
March 24, 2004
Our ancestors branched off from those of chimpanzees some six million years ago. Since then, our lineage became human--and distinctly unlike other apes. Figuring out how that difference evolved is one of the grand challenges of biology. Until now, scientists have gotten most of their clues by…
March 24, 2004
In February I wrote an article in Popular Science about a project to implant electrodes in a monkey's brain allowing the monkey to control a robot arm with its mind. The goal of this work is to let paralyzed people operate prosthetic limbs by thought alone. Now the research team has announced…