loom | May 16, 2006The BBC has a short article on the first DNA isolated from a Neanderthal's nucleus. (Previous efforts have gotten DNA from their mitochondria, which are small energy-generating organelles.) The results, announced at a meeting, are the fruits of a new method for extracting genetic information from fossils. Theoretically it should be possible to pull together a lot of pieces of Neanderthal DNA into something approaching a genome. We'll have to wait for the big paper for the details, but these early clues suggest it will be worth the wait.
Update: More from John Hawks here.
loom | May 15, 2006If you keep a vegetable garden, there's a fair chance you'll encounter a grisly sight this summer. Some poor caterpillar will be clutching a leaf, with the pupae of parasitic wasps sprouting off its back. It has just died in a most grotesque way. A wasp has zeroed in on the caterpillar and injected eggs into its body. The eggs hatched, and the larvae devoured their hosts from within, keeping it alive until they were ready to emerge.
What makes this sight all the more grotesque is the fact that the plant the caterpillar is sitting on may have been an accomplice to the crime. When caterpillars…
loom | May 11, 2006Viruses have a special place at the Loom--they're ubiquitous and have some pretty profound influences on the evolution of their hosts (including us). But a French scientist named Patrick Forterre wants to take it up a notch. He's arguing that our very DNA is the creation of viruses some four billion years ago. It's a controversial idea, but one that other scientists are definitely taking seriously. I've got the full story is here in today's issue of Science, and here on my web site. For gorey details, see The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for a paper by Forterre that surveys…
loom | May 10, 2006In case you were worrying that life on Earth would be wiped out by a catastrophic burst of gamma rays, rest easy. It turns out that our galaxy may not be a very good source of gamma ray bursts. I found this particularly interesting given recent speculation that gamma rays bursts might have triggered mass extinctions in the past. (News article here, original paper here.) The bursts are clearly catastrophic, but probably not close enough to Earth to cause much trouble.
loom | May 8, 2006For those interested in Tiktaalik, the marvelous new transitional fossil of a fish with limbs, check out this new essay from Neil Shubin, one of the fossil's discoverers.
loom | May 5, 2006It's always great to hear senior scientists talk about the bad old days, when one computer could fill an entire room and no one could say what genes were made of. Eric Kandel of Columbia has been studying memory since the 1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work. These days he's observing genes switching on and off at the junctions between neurons. But when he started out, he had to content himself with sticking electrodes into crayfish (chosen for their fat neurons). To observe their neurons, scientists would hook up the electrodes to amplifiers and loudspeakers, and the crackle…
loom | May 3, 2006X-Men may be closer than you think | CNET News.com
I suspect all science writers have had the unhappy experience sooner or later of busting their butts to translate tough science into clear writing, only to have a headline writer top it off with a load of nonsense.
For more on the unhappy collision between Darwin and X-men see Chris Mooney here.
(Fraternal hat tip)
loom | May 2, 2006In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like a balloon. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong…
loom | May 1, 2006Today I've got an article in the New York Times about the report in Nature that starlings can recognize syntax-like patterns in songs, and what that might mean--if anything--for the evolution of language. The blogs have been buzzing about the study since it came out on Wednesday, with the Language Log logging in several complaints about bad science and bad reporting. (Fortunately, they gave me a pass, and I hope not merely because I'm the brother of one of the bloggers there!)
So why should you now turn to Tuesday's science section of the Times, days after the wires and the blogs have had…
loom | May 1, 2006The Loom gathered a bit of dust over the past couple weeks as I grappled with another round of deadlines for work that actually pays the mortgage. Life should now get relaxed enough for more blogging, I hope--starting this evening. And as the articles I've been working on come out in the next few weeks, I'll point you to the links--starting with my recent (brief but free) take
on the new fossil of snakes with legs for the New York Times. And speaking of evolutionary transitions, I'm also happy to bring news of a cool new project, called Kosmos: You Are Here. It's an e-book on the history of…
loom | April 11, 2006Tomorrow I'll be on the radio show Science and Society at 4:20 PM EST. It's my second time on the show. Last time around we talked about the past six million years of hominid evolution (podcast here). This time we're hoping to cover just a bit more ground: the past 600 million years of vertebrate evolution. We'll try to hit on the big innovations that our ancestors acquired after we parted ways with the squishy beasts--such as brains, bones, a smart immune system, and hands and feet. You can listen live here, and the podcast should be available here shortly afterwards. is here. (Scroll down…
loom | April 10, 2006At the Loom we believe that the path to wisdom runs through the Land of Gross.
We do not show you pictures of worms crawling out of frog noses merely to ruin your lunch. We do not urge you to check out these freaky videos of worms crawling out of frog mouths and fish gills merely to give you something to talk about at the high school cafeteria table tomorrow (Dude, you totally will not believe what I saw...) These images have something profound to say.
The worm in question is the gordian worm or horsehair worm, Paragordius tricuspidatus. It has become famous in recent months for its powers of…
loom | April 9, 2006On Thursday I wrote about a new paper reporting the reconstruction of a 450-million year old hormone receptor, and experiments indicating how it evolved into two receptors found in living vertebrates such as ourselves.
On Friday I took a look at the initial response to the paper from intelligent design advocates at the Discovery Insitute. They claim that there exist biological systems that show "irreducible complexity," which could not possibly have evolved. In response to the new research, intelligent design advocates claimed that hormones and their receptors do not actually make the cut as…
loom | April 7, 2006Yesterday I blogged about a new study in which scientists reconstructed 450 million year old proteins in order to trace the evolution of some receptors for hormones. The paper itself does not comment on the implications these results have for intelligent design, which claims that some biological systems are too complex to have evolved. But in the accompanying commentary, Chris Adami does. (Adami is the brains behind Avida, an artificial life program that I wrote about in Discover in 2005.) He writes,
Although these authors have not directly addressed this controversy in the discussion of…
loom | April 6, 2006Over the last few years, scientists have figured out how to recreate biological molecules that were last seen on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. Until now, scientists have reconstructed ancient proteins to gather clues about life was like long ago. But now some scientists at the University of Oregon have done something new with these old proteins: they used them to figure out how evolution produces complex systems--exactly the sort of systems that creationists would have us believe cannot evolve.
Scientists reconstruct an ancestral protein by tracing its evolution into new versions…
loom | April 6, 2006Mark Siddall, the leech hunter, is on another quest. He's posting updated from his journeys through Australia in search of new leeches. Read them at Blood Lust II.
loom | April 6, 2006My blog had some serious troubles while I was away for a few days, but I should have everything up and running smoothly today, including comments (aside from those concerining poker and drugs).
loom | April 5, 2006Tiktaalik: music to my ears.
Tiktaalik is the lilting name of a newly discovered fossil fish with fingers. It lived 380 million years ago in the northern reaches of Canada, back when the northern reaches of Canada were tropical coastal wetlands not far from the equator. Tiktaalik's discoverers (Ted Daeschler, Neil Shubin, and Farish Jenkins) detailed their discovery in back-to-back papers in today's issue of Nature. In some ways Tiktaalik is big news. It may prove to be the single most important fossil for telling us how our ancestors changed from fish to land vertebrates complete with legs,…
loom | March 31, 2006A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, two new papers add some pieces to the puzzle of how these viruses get into our genomes, and how they affect our health along the way.
The first paper offers a striking portrait of a virus hopping species. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic stumbled across the virus as they were studying…
loom | March 28, 2006No, there's nothing wrong with your RSS feed. This blog has just gone very quiet as I've become insanely busy with an upcoming talk and my new book project (more on both later). I don't expect to have time to blog till the first week in April. But I'll have some delicious items to discuss then.