loom | December 27, 2006Fellow scienceblogger Coturnix is assembling some posts about science for an anthology. He's been asking for people to contribute suggestions. I've been meaning to thumb through my old posts in order to send one over, but it's been more of a challenge than I thought. Part of the problem is that pieces of writing are like children, and it's no fun to break up the family. The other part of the problem is that my brain is just about reduced to goo between finishing my book and managing a couple of sick kids over the Christmas break. So let me turn to you, dear reader. Is there any post on the…
loom | December 25, 2006All I want for Christmas is a lying frog and a bubble-sniffing mole.
For those who want to head for the original papers, check out:
1. "Why Animals Lie: How Dishonesty and Belief Can Coexist in a Signaling System" (free full text)
2. "Underwater 'sniffing' by semi-aquatic mammals"
Happy Holidays!
UPDATE 12/26: Forgot to mention yesterday that I also talk about the dishonesty article on this week's edition of the Times Science podcast.
loom | December 18, 2006The manuscript clock is still ticking, and so, in lieu of true blogging, let me direct your attention to another article of mine. This time it's the cover story in the December issue of Discover. Discover chose Jay Keasling as their scientist of the year and asked me to interview him. Keasling, who directs the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology, is trying to get either E. coli or yeast to crank out a powerful malaria drug normally only made by the sweet wormwood plant. I had already been getting familiar with Keasling's work, since it is a great example of the sort of work that's being…
loom | December 15, 2006My radio silence is the result of a perfect storm--reporting trips, upcoming holidays, and the minor matter of my deadline for turning in my book at the end of the year. Any free moment gets gobbled up before I can even think about blogging. But I can point you to some pieces of mine that are now coming out in various non-blog outlets. First up: the natural history of play. It's part of a special report on games that appeared yesterday in Forbes.com.
loom | December 4, 2006Thanks to PZ Myers for calling attention to this superb video of Corydceps, a parasitic fungus that drives its insect host up a plant before growing a spike out of its head. Leave it to David Attenborough, master of the nature documentary, to bring the beauty of this parasite to video. I've seen photographs of Cordyceps before, but I never knew it made such a graceful entrance.
What's particularly cool about Cordyceps is that it is not alone. Other parasites drive their hosts to bizarre heights. Another fungus, called Entomophthora muscae, drives houseflies and other insects upwards, climbing…
loom | November 19, 2006Well, it's been worth the wait. The week-long attack from the intelligent design crowd on me explodes in a final fireball of absurdity. Read more in the final update of my response to the Pinto-loving Discovery Institute.
loom | November 16, 2006The Discovery Institute has fired a second post at me and my National Geographic article on evolution. I've updated my post to explain why they're shooting blanks.
In the comment thread, some people asked why I was wasting time dealing with this stuff. The reason is simple: if I don't show why these attacks are baseless, some people may assume there's some truth to them. And since I put a fair amount of work into this article, I want to do my part to set things straight. Since the Discovery Institute does not see fit to put a comment thread on their "Evolution News and Views" site, this is…
loom | November 14, 2006Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you're in luck. Cornell has put the video of the talk online. The image is pretty small on the screen, so I decided to post the slide show on my web site here. I suggest opening two screens and advancing the slides as the talk progresses.
At first the sound is a little scratchy on the video and the light balance takes a while to get properly adjusted. But don't give up--it evens out. You may also…
loom | November 13, 2006Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well. The Discovery Institute in Seattle claims that it has spent millions on research. They have precious little to show for it. As I wrote last year, a single evolutionary biologist produces more papers in peer-reviewed biology journals than the entire staff of the Discovery Institute. You'd be hard-…
loom | November 7, 2006Attention all Loom readers in the Cornell University area: I'm heading up to Ithaca to give a talk tomorrow on a subject near and dear to my heart--how parasites turn their hosts into puppets and slaves. I'll be at the David Call auditorium in Kennedy Hall at 4 pm. The lecture is open to the public and will, of course, include a very creepy Powerpoint. Details here, map here.
loom | November 7, 2006A while back I blogged about the tens of thousands of viruses we carry in our genomes. In today's New York Times I write about how scientists reconstructed a working ancestral virus from its disabled descendants: Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA.
Here's the original paper.
loom | October 26, 2006Just an update to my post about talking this weekend at the National Association of Science Writers meeting: in addition to the panel I was originally scheduled to join--on book publicity--I've also been added to a panel talk on Friday afternoon called "Navigating the New Media." I'm subbing for writer Rebecca Skloot, who cannot come.
loom | October 25, 2006To sequence the human genome, scientists established a network of laboratories, equipped with robots that could analyze DNA day and night. Once they began to finish up the human genome a few years ago, they began to wonder what species to sequence next. With millions of species to choose from, they could only pick a handful that would give the biggest bang for the buck. Squabbling ensued, with different coalitions of scientists lobbied for different species. Some argued successfully for medically important species, such as the mosquito that carries malaria. Others made the case for…
loom | October 22, 2006I'll be speaking on Saturday at the National Association of Science Writers annual meeting in Baltimore. I'll be discussing how writers can publicize science books in the age of the Internet. It's a subject I'm still figuring out for myself, so I won't be dispensing advice so much as sharing thoughts. Details are here.
I'm part of a scienceblogger invasion at the meeting. Matthew Nisbet will be there, talking about reporting on global warming, and Chris Mooney will be speaking about writing about science in new media.
loom | October 20, 2006Martin Schaefer, one of the scientists I wrote about in my recent post on autumn leaves, has joined the comment thread and kindly answered some questions about his work. Check it out.
loom | October 18, 2006Flowers, flagella, feathers. Life is rife with complex features--structures and systems made up of many interacting parts. National Geographic magazine asked me to take a tour of complexity in life and report on the latest research on how it evolved. What struck me over and over again was how scientists studying everything from bacteria to humans are drawn back to the same concepts--making new copies of old parts, for example, or borrowing parts of one complex trait to evolve a new one. And in each case, complexity opens up the way to diversity, because something many parts can be rearranged…
loom | October 18, 2006This fall we've had some rude visitors out by the front door. One morning a strangely foul smell wafted through the windows. When we looked outside for a dead animal, we found nothing. But we noticed some downright obscene growths foisting themselves out of the flower beds. Thus I got my first introduction to the stinkhorn.
Stinkhorns are pornographic mushrooms. They form large underground webs of threads, which feed on dead and dying plant matter. At scattered points in the stinkhorn network, white rubbery spheres grow. Inside each of them is a pre-formed stinkhorn, which can then spring…
loom | October 17, 2006As the autumn leaves turn handsomely, I've been wondering, why do trees bother? It's a question scientists have been asking for the past few years, and for the first time, they've carried out an experiment to find out.
The color of an autumn leaf can actually take a lot of work. In the fall, the green chlorophyll in a tree fades away, while the tree actively builds new pigments to turn it red or yellow. It's generally agreed that these colors must serve some function for trees. Otherwise, natural selection would favor drab trees that dropped their leaves without such bother. They could use…
loom | October 13, 2006Galileo discovered Saturn's rings, but called them ears. If only he could see what Cassini sees.
Cue kettledrums...
loom | October 12, 2006Toxoplasma, that mind-altering, cell-manipulating, all-around awesome parasite that sits in the brains of billions of us, is back in the news. Infection with the parasite raises the chances a woman will have a boy from 51% to 72%. The average ratio of boys to girls at birth is 51%. Women with high levels of antibodies to Toxoplasma, scientists found, have a 72% chance of having a boy. While many effects of Toxoplasma probably have something to do with adaptations that allow the parasite to thrive and spread successfully, this one seems more like a side-effect, albeit a dramatic one.
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