loom | October 10, 2006The Seed in-house blog, Page 3.14 has been running Q & A's with some of its bloggers. Mine's up now.
loom | October 8, 2006Two 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 about the size of a chimp's. Making the report particularly remarkable was the fact that this hominid, which the scientists dubbed Homo floresiensis, lived as recently as 18,000 years ago. I wrote up a post on the paper, and took note of some strong skepticism from some quarters. And since then, I…
loom | October 2, 2006This 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 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes…
loom | September 28, 2006PZ 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 last month. Wells claims that this discovery is a serious threat to evolution. Why? Because scientists have only just found the gene, because many genes are involved in building the human brain, and because finding a gene that's different in humans than in other animals doesn't actually reveal what…
loom | 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 historical records with geological evidence from the West Pacific to reach back 1.35 million years (kyr= thousands of years ago). The scale is telescoped near the right end, since recent warming has been so fast that it would be hard to make out its details otherwise. Two lines mark some average recent…
loom | September 22, 2006Last 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 intelligent design trial, and Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin, the leading historian of the anti-evolution movement in the U.S. (I'll be writing an introduction to the volume that comes out of the lectures.)
If you're interested, you can watch videos of the lectures now, here.
loom | September 19, 2006Congratulations 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, see my blog post from last year and my article on some of Catania's recent work for the New York Times.
loom | September 18, 2006Over 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 came up. It turns out that antibiotics are the last thing you want to take if you get sick with Escherichia coli O157:H7. It may turn a nasty--but temporary--case of bloody diarrhea into fatal organ failure.
More below the fold...
Like other microbes, Escherichia coli O157:H7 carries a number genes…
loom | September 17, 2006I'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 know about some more talks as they approach.
loom | September 15, 2006Don'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 of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there's been a report of one death in Wisconsin.
There's a fascinating--albeit gruesome--backstory to this outbreak, which I've been researching for my next book, a portrait of Escherichia coli.…
loom | September 15, 2006Welcome to the club, Chris Mooney...
Chris Mooney is the author of the excellent book, The Republican War on Science. He examines big hot-button scientific issues of the day such as global warming, stem cell research, and, of course, evolution. It's a polemic, to be sure, but a well-researched one. Over the past couple weeks I've been meaning to write a post here to let readers know that it has just come out in paperback, with some great updates since the hardback. But it's been hard enough for me to find time to blog, period, and it seemed like Mooney was enjoying a good reception without…
loom | September 13, 2006Before 1833 there were no scientists.
It was in that year that William Whewell, a British philosopher, geologist, and all-around bright bulb, coined the word scientist. His mentor, the poet Samuel Coleridge, thought the English language needed a term for someone who studied the natural world but who did not inhabit the lofty heights of philosophy (like Coleridge).
There are plenty of people who lived before 1833 that most of us would call scientists--Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Edmund Halley, Carol Linnaeus to name just a few. But the word would have been meaningless to them. The closest…
loom | September 8, 2006The comment thread over on my recent creationist-critique post has been very lively. A second creationist has joined in the fray, and I've posted a response.
loom | September 4, 2006This female praying mantis is finishing up the last tasty bits of the male that just mated with her. In the lead article in tomorrow's science section of the New York Times, I talk to scientists who study females of some species that sometimes devour their mates. Sexual cannibalism is not common, but it is revealing. The evolutionary forces that shape the sexes can drive them into some extreme conflicts, even turning one sex into a meal for the other. In some cases, males actually become partners in their own demise--passively or complicitly. A new study indicates that male praying mantises…
loom | August 31, 2006Before I moved the Loom to this address earlier this year, I got a fair amount of comments on my blogs about evolution from creationists. (See this entry, for example.) They fell off after the move, but now they're back in fine form. Today we are joined by Kevin Anderson, editor-in-chief of the Creation Research Society Quarterly.
Here's a little background: last week I wrote here about stumbling across a radio show put out by the Institute of Creation Research. It claimed that recent research on the human genome supports Young Earth creationism. Dr. Anderson spoke on the program about how…
loom | August 30, 2006From time to time, my Seed magazine hosts throw out a question for bloggers to answer. Today's question is concerns a column by James S. Robbins on global warming in the National Review Online. Robbins claims that global warming will be a great thing if it happens, which he doubts. The question is, does he have a point?
The question of what the full range of effects from global warming will be--both good and bad--is an important one, but Robbins shows little ability to offer an answer. His column overlooks important things, gets various facts wrong, and belies a general ignorance of and…
loom | August 28, 2006I'll admit, I was a bit surprised when Popular Mechanics got in touch with me a while back about writing a story about aliens. I had always associated the magazine with people who knew how to take their car apart down to the last bolt and put it back together again. (Me, I gush with pride if I can change a wiper blade.) But they've actually been making a big push into science reporting, and they wanted me to look into what scientists are learning about life on other planets. I ended up focusing specifically on how life on Earth (and in labs) can guide the search for aliens. That's an angle I'…
loom | August 25, 2006The language of DNA is written in a four-letter alphabet. The four different chemical units of DNA (called nucleotides) create an incomprehenisbly vast range of possibility codes. Consider a short sequence of 41 nucleotides. There are over 4.8 trillion trillion possible sequences it could take. In this vast universe of possibilities, how can natural selection hit on new DNA sequences that help life survive?
All living things have genes. Enzymes read those genes and produce a copy of their code, which a cell can then use to build a protein. But in order to read a gene, the enzymes must first…
loom | August 24, 2006Cut-and-paste creationism?
Yesterday I pointed readers to a column attacking evolution by Jack Kemp on the web site Town Hall. Today a sharp-eyed commenter pointed out that it is almost entirely identical to a column from Phyllis Schlafly from August 16 on the Eagle Forum. I don't know if these pages are going to be pulled down or otherwise altered if word gets out, so here's a screengrab of Kemp and of Schlafly. It looks pretty much word for word identical to me. You be the judge...
Update 2:50 pm: I wonder if Town Hall got its columnists jumbled. This page lists Kemp's column and a piece by…
loom | August 23, 2006Scoop up some dirt, and you'll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. Each slime mold prowls through the soil, searching for bacteria which it engulfs and digests. After gorging itself sufficiently, it divides in two, and the new pair go their separate, bacteria-devouring ways. But if the Dictyostelium in a stamp-size plot of soil should eat their surroundings clean, they send each other…