loom | July 10, 2006A couple readers have emailed me asking what I think of the recent Nature article on blogs by scientists. I agree with Revere that it's great that Nature (and specifically, Nature reporter Declan Butler) is paying such close attention to blogs in science. The top 50 list they provide is a good launch pad for rocketing off into this realm of the blogosphere.
But I've always loathed the newsiness of lists. Put a number on a cover, and you sell copies. There must be some weird psychological weakness we have for lists. I noticed that the headline on the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly is…
loom | July 10, 2006I just want to make one thing clear. When Ann Coulter talks about her Giant Raccoon Flatulence Theory, she's talking about me. Don't let anyone else tell you that they are a giant flatulent raccoon. They're all just a bunch of wannabes. For I am the One True Giant Flatulent Raccoon.
Allow me to explain...
Coulter dedicates the last four chapers of her new book Godless to evolution. She claims that it is nothing more than the religion of liberalism (as opposed to the foundation of modern biology, as 92 national scientific academies and dozens of scientific societies attest.)
When I first…
loom | July 3, 2006In today's New York Times I have an article about the discovery of a vast graveyard of dodo fossils. The fossils date back an estimated 3,000 years. Dodo fossils are exquisitely rare, and so it's quite something to find an entire assemblage of them. But as the leader of the expedition that found them told me, that discovery alone would have been scientifically unimportant. What matters is the entire package. The scientists found fossils of lots of other animals and plants. It wasn't just the dodo that went extinct on the island of Mauritius. It was an entire ecosystem, and these fossils may…
loom | June 26, 2006Last night I took the ferry across Long Island Sound to spend the day in Stony Brook at Evolution 2006, the joint annual meeting of American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. About 1500 scientists were there, and there were enough talks going on--often simultaneously--to keep me in constant motion from eight in the morning till eleven at night.
The presentations were all over the map. In one study, scientists were pinpointing the molecular changes that Southwestern Indians have acquired to their cells as they adapted to…
loom | June 21, 2006It's been twenty months now since scientists reported discovering fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores belonging to a three-foot-tall hominid with a brain the size of a chimp that lived recently as 12,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis, as this hominid was dubbed, has inspired two clashing interpretations. Its discoverers declared it a separate species descended from another branch of hominids. In others words, the most recent common ancestor we share with Homo floresiensis lived two or even three million years ago. Skeptics argued that the fossils belonged to human pygmies. The one…
loom | June 19, 2006Next time I go to the doctor, I think I'll get him to give me a test for Toxoplasma. Fifty million Americans have the parasite, so I wouldn't be the first. And if I was carrying it around in my head, that might explain why it's so fascinating to me.
I first encountered the strange ways of this single-celled creature while working on my book Parasite Rex, and since then I've tried to keep up with new research on what makes it so successful. In January I wrote on the Loom about a potential link between Toxoplasma and schizophrenia.
In Tuesday's New York Times I have an article that surveys…
loom | June 17, 2006Two hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts, an African lion killed someone. Along with a meal, the big cat got a wicked stomachache. Today a record of that unfortunate death still survives, in the bacteria that make big cats sick.
The trail of this strange story starts in the 1980s, when scientists discovered that ulcers are caused by bacteria known as known as Helicobacter pylori. H. pylori is found in people around the world, and scientists learned how to recognize the different strains they carried. Based on the patterns of the strains, a team of scientists concluded in 2003 that…
loom | June 15, 2006A bunch of good reviews on natural selection in humans are coming out, reflecting the explosion of research on how evolution has shaped our genome. See here and here. Today in Science another good one is out. What sets this one apart from the others is that it comes with a slide show with audio from the authors. As far as I can tell, the show is free. And it's a pretty clear summary. Check it out.
loom | June 14, 2006The other day I was interviewed on KUCI-FM in Irvine, California, about the evolution of bacteria in yogurt. You can listen to the podcast here.
loom | June 14, 2006Scientists have figured out many ways to study the origin of species. They can build evoluitonary trees, to see how species descend from a common ancestor. They can survey islands or mountains or lakes to see how ecological conditions foster the rise of new species. They can look for fossils that offer clues to how long ago species branched off from one another, and how their ranges spread or shrank. Now comes a new trick in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature: to test their ideas about how a new species of butterfly came to be, they essentially recreated it in their lab.
The new species…
loom | June 9, 2006Greetings. As I bring in my html luggage and unpack, let me stop for a moment to introduce myself and this blog.
I'm a science writer. I started out at Discover, where I ended up as a senior editor before heading out into the freelance world in 1999. Since then I've written for a number of magazines, and over the last couple years I've been writing pretty regularly for the Science Times section of the New York Times.
I also write books, which I've placed in the left column for those who are interested. I'm now trying to crank through the sixth, a biography of Escherichia coli (at least when I…
loom | June 9, 2006When we speak of the Hobbit, let us not forget her tools.
Last year, scientists reported discovering fossils of a three-foot-tall hominid that they named Homo floresiensis, and which I can't keep myself from calling the Hobbit. Its bones turned up in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, dating from 97,000 to 12,000 years ago. The scientists argued that the Hobbit represented an ancient lineage of hominids, perhaps descending from Homo erectus, a human-sized species that existed in Asia 1.8 million years ago, or perhaps belonging to even an older lineage, known as australopithecines.…
loom | May 29, 2006Usually when you hear about the rapid evolution of bacteria, the story is typically some grim tale of antibiotic resistance or the emergence of some pathogen once restricted to animals. Here's a nicer narrative, but no less instructive. In tomorrow's New York Times I have an article about yogurt, and how the bacteria in its culture have been undergoing drastic genomic change since the stuff was invented some 5000 years ago.
I report on a new study on Lactobacillus bulgaricus, found in many yogurt cultures. (The paper comes out some time this week in PNAS.) The analysis, based on the microbe's…
loom | May 25, 2006If you're in the neighborhood of Woods Hole, Mass., let me invite you to my talk on Friday, June 9 at the Marine Biological Laboratory. I'll be talking about human evolution, but given that I'll be at the Marine Biological Laboratory, I figure I'll include some discussion of the marine biology in our past.
The talk is at 7 at the Lillie Auditorium, and it's free and open to the public. Directions are here.
loom | May 23, 2006
Over the past few months I've been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I've been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade.
In addition to his work on Escherichia coli, Turner also studies viruses called phi-six that infect…
loom | May 23, 2006Oliver Morton, science writer and Nature news editor, is blogging after a long hiatus at MainlyMartian. He's reporting from the Synthetic Biology 2.0 meeting in Berkeley. Check it out.
Update: Actually, you may want to check out the cross-posting at Nature's blogs. Same entries, with comments.
loom | May 22, 2006In tomorrow's New York Times I have an article about the origin of species--or rather, blocking the origin of species. The evolution of a new species can be a drawn out process, taking thousands or millions of years. First populations begin to diverge from each other. Later, those populations may become divided by significant reproductive barriers. Even after those populations have evolved into separate species, they may still be able to produce hybrids in the right conditions. In some cases, those hybrids may remain rare and the two species will remain intact. In other cases, the species…
loom | May 18, 2006It's been a little over a year and a half now since scientists announced the disocvery of the most controversial fossil in the field of human origins: Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. Scientists found bones of a dimunitive hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores, and estimated that it lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. It stood about as high as a normal three year old human child and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. But its bones were also found with stone tools. The scientists declared the bones were not human. Instead, they belonged to a species of their own--one that…
loom | May 17, 2006Nothing gets the blood boiling like a manimal. For many people, the idea of breaching the human species barrier--to mingle our biology with that of an animal--seems like a supreme affront to the moral order. In his January state of the union address, President Bush called for a ban on "creating human-animal hybrids."
These so-called chimeras, according to their opponents, devalue humanity by breaching our species barrier. "Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale," Bush declared. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas expanded on…
loom | May 16, 2006A few days ago I explained how an evolutionary change in our hominid ancestors could explain a spectacular surprise failure of a clinical drug trial. At last, I see that the paper is now online