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Bones Give Peek Into the Lives of Neanderthals

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The New York Times, December 20, 2010

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Deep in a cave in the forests of northern Spain are the remains of a gruesome massacre. The first clues came to light in 1994, when explorers came across a pair of what they thought were human jawbones in the cave, called El Sidrón. At first, the bones were believed to date to the Spanish Civil War. Back then, Republican fighters used the cave as a hide-out. The police discovered more bone fragments in El Sidrón, which they sent to forensic scientists, who determined that the bones did not belong to soldiers, or even to modern humans. They were the remains of Neanderthals who died 50,000 years ago.

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Fifty Years of Animal Technology

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Psychology Today, December 16, 2010

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Let us take a moment to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the greatest take-down of human hubris. In November 1960, a 29-year-old British woman named Jane Goodall was wrapping up a long field season among the chimpanzees of Tanzania. She had won their trust, or at least their indifference, and so Goodall could observe the chimpanzees up close, discovering things about their behavior that no one had seen before. One day, walking alone through a valley, she passed by a termite mound with a tree stump nearby. It occurred to Goodall that there was no stump there. She dropped to the ground, realizing that a chimpanzee was crouched over the mound, fifty yards from her. He was eating termites.

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“This Paper Should Not Have Been Published”

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Slate, December 7, 2010

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On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.” Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.

Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand.

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A Man From Whom Viruses Can’t Hide

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The New York Times, November 22, 2010

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Dr. W. Ian Lipkin was spending the afternoon prowling his empire of viruses. The Center for Infection and Immunity, which he directs, occupies three floors of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Rather than wait for the elevator, Dr. Lipkin ran up and down the back stairs to move from floor to floor, leaning into the doorways of labs and glass-walled offices to get updates from a platoon of scientists.

Gustavo Palacios was sequencing the genes from a new strain of Ebola virus found in a bat in Spain–a worrisome development, since the fatal virus has almost never been found outside Africa.

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The “Router” in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing

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Discover, November 15, 2010

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Pop quiz: What is 357 times 289? No pencils allowed. No calculators. Just use your brain.

Got an answer yet? Got it now? How about now? Chances are you still don’t. As you solved the problem one step at a time, you lost track of the numbers. Maybe you tried to start over, lost track again, and eventually gave up in frustration before you could discover that the answer was 103,173. I used a calculator to get that, I confess.

Our mutual failure is absurd. The brain is, in the words of neuroscientist Floyd Bloom, “the most complex structure that exists in the universe.”

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