loom | December 12, 2007In my latest column for Wired, I take a look at the ever-fascinating intersection between engineering and biology. An electrical engineer-turned-ecologist uses the principles of circuits to track the flow of genes in endangered species. Remarkably, it works. Take a look.
loom | December 10, 2007In tomorrow's New York Times, I have a story about some very fun research--the study of the world's biggest gulp. Some new research indicates that the biggest species of whales eat by gulping their own weight in water every thirty seconds. They do so in much the same way a parachute stops a race car.
Here's the article.
Here's the podcast (I come on at about 8:30)
Here's the original paper.
And here are the web sites of two of the authors, Nick Pyenson and Jeremy Goldbogen.
loom | December 8, 2007I've set up a web page for the workshop I'll be teaching at Yale next month. If I had to sum up my line of work in four hours, a few things to read, and one writing assignment, this would probably be it.
loom | December 7, 2007Here is my first obituary in the New York Times, for Seymour Benzer. (It was pure coincidence, apparently, that they contacted me a couple days after I blogged about Benzer here.) It's a nerve-racking experience summing up someone's life in a few hundred words, especially a life as jam-packed as Benzer's. Here's one of many things that didn't make it in: Benzer's quest to find the genetic basis for loving spicy Asian food (via Jim Hu)
loom | December 7, 2007""I did my Ph. D on olfaction in sea turtles, sequencing the olfactory receptor genes of the three species featured in my tattoo (leatherback, loggerhead and green). The "bubbles" represent DNA."--Dr. Michelle Vieyra, University of South Carolina.
Congratulations, Dr. Vierya--your submission is the 100th addition to my Flickr set of science tattoos. Make full use of your bragging rights.
[See also New Scientist's droll blog coverage of this project.]
loom | December 4, 2007Back in 2005 my daughter Charlotte, then a four-year-old, took part in a study to see how kids stack up mentally against chimpanzees. I wrote about the ambivalent experience of watching her as both a father and a curious science writer in the New York Times. The emerging lesson of the study, led by Yale grad student Derek Lyons, was that children overimitate even though they should know better. Lyons showed the children how to get a toy out of a container, adding in lots of unnecessary tapping of walls and sliding of rods and such. Other scientists had tested chimpanzees on similar…
loom | December 3, 2007My latest conversation at bloggingheads is up--a discussion of stem cell biology and politics with Lee Silver, Princeton biologist and author of Challenging Nature. Check it out.
loom | December 1, 2007My bad--for some reason I thought my piece on NPR would air this morning. It was on the news tonight. And you can listen to it here.
loom | December 1, 2007The great biologist Seymour Benzer passed away yesterday. If you know Benzer, it's probably through Jonathan Weiner's masterful book, Time, Love, Memory, which focused on how Benzer discovered the influence of genes on behavior in fruit flies. But Benzer was one of those rare scientists who had enough time in his life for more than one great project. Before Benzer turned to fruit flies, he studied E. coli. And in studying that wonderful microbe, he helped to figure out what genes are in the first place.
In the early 1950s Benzer gave up a career in physics for biology after reading Erwin…
loom | December 1, 2007Last year I wrote about the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, which injects venom into cockroaches to turn them into zombie hosts for their parasitic offspring. (More posts on Ampulex here.) The scientists I wrote about have been trying to figure out what exactly the venom does to the nervous system of their victims, and they've discovered that it interferes with a neurotransmitter called octopamine. New Scientist has an update. And they also have a link to a YouTube video that offers more than you may want to see of this awesome parasitic manipulation.
loom | November 30, 2007A quick heads-up: I'll be talking about the tree of life tomorrow morning on NPR's Saturday Weekend Edition. The segment will be archived on their "Science Out of the Box" web page. We'll be talking about everything from animals to mushrooms to the unclassifiable viruses that graft the tree of life into a web.
Update: 12/1 10 am: ...or maybe not. As far as I could tell over the breakfast din, the piece didn't run this morning. I'll let you know when and if it does.
Update: 12/1 5:30 pm: The piece just ran. I don't think I made any major gaffes, but fact-check away. Here's where you can listen…
loom | November 28, 2007The Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology has rolled out the "Stevens Seventy," the seventy greatest science books since 1900. If you click all the way through to Z, my 2000 book Parasite Rex ends the list. Many thanks.
As the introduction to the list points out, these things are always arbitrary, so judge for yourself. Did they leave any classics off? Did they honor an unworthy title?
loom | November 27, 2007I just noticed that in the new issue of the New Yorker Michael Specter has written an article on the viruses in our genome. I wrote about this research in the New York Times a year ago. I haven't had a chance to read the article through yet, but I was mortified to come across this line...
Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short.
What happened to the New Yorker's legendary fact-checking staff?…
loom | November 27, 2007For my latest "Dissection" column in Wired, I take a look at the tree of life, and the way it changed dramatically thirty years ago this month. To get a sense of what the tree looks like today, I pointed readers to the wonderful interactive tree of life at the European Molecular Biology Lab. But I didn't realize until after I finished the column that when you scroll over the branches of the tree, pictures pop up of species at their tips. Most of the pictures are of assorted chains, blobs, and other microbial portraits. But things get more interesting in the animal kingdom. Iz very nice!
Hat…
loom | November 20, 2007Once the writers' strike is over, anyone in the mood to make a new monster movie might consider this beast, described today in the journal Biology Letters. It's Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, a "sea scorpion" that lived 390 million years ago. Based on a fossil of its enormous claws was found in Germany, scientists estimate it measured 2.5 meters long. It's the biggest arthropod yet known, a giant among giants. At this period in the history of life, lots of insects, millipedes, and other sea scorpions grew to science-fiction sizes, possibly thanks to the high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere at…
loom | November 20, 2007 "This neuron tattoo was done a few months ago. When I was 18, my dad passed away from Lou Gehrig's, which is a disease of motor neurons that innervate muscles. His battle with neurodegeneration helped me decide on a career in medical research, and I am currently pursuing my PhD in Neuroscience."--Lindsay
I fell behind on my Friday uploads to the Flickr site. But the tattoos keep coming. We're up to 97...so if you want to be tattoo #100, email me soon.
loom | November 20, 2007The deja vu is hitting hard.
Two years ago a Pennsylvania court was hearing a challenge to introducing intelligent design into a public school in the town of Dover. At the time, I argued that people should look south to understand the stakes of the conflict. Down in Florida the state government seemed to be trying to have it both ways when it came to creationism. The chair of the state House Education Council introduced a bill that would allow students to sue their professors if they didn't consider intelligent in class. Governor Bush refused to comment on whether intelligent design should be…
loom | November 20, 2007A couple months ago, I wrote a feature for Discover about the intriguing possibility that life might have originated more than once on Earth--and that maybe those alternative life forms were still alive among us today. Paul Davies, one of the scientists who has explored this idea in recent years, has written an account of it that's the cover story of this month's Scientific American. Check it out. Davies offers some neat possibilities, such as the notion that living things might use arsenic instead of phosphorus to store energy. One creature's poison...
loom | November 20, 2007My fellow bloggingheads John Horgan and George Johnson took some time on their latest science talk to dissect my New York Times article on swarms (you can jump to that section here). John wonders if I'm just discovering all the complexity stuff he and George were writing about back in the 1990s. I think it's always good for John to keep everyone aware of the dangers of hype, of the need to ask how important or new scientific research really is. He's been particularly tough on the science of complexity, if there is such a thing. In 1995 he wrote a piece in Scientific American that practically…
loom | November 20, 2007I'm back from California and the award ceremony I mentioned last week. The trip was fun but a little absurd--I flew across the country and back within 36 hours. It's time for some serious carbon offsetting. I got to hang out with ABC's Robert Krulwich without having to go into a forest, and was finally able to put a face to RadioLab's Jad Abumrad's incantory voice. I find I can never, ever predict what someone looks like from how they sound on the radio. Eric Kandel came to pick up a prize for his book, In Search of Memory<. During a discussion with some journalism students, he and I got…