When Martin Nowak was in high school, his parents thought he would be a nice boy and become a doctor. But when he left for the University of Vienna, he abandoned medicine for something called biochemistry. As far as his parents could tell, it had something to do with yeast and fermenting. They became a little worried. When their son entered graduate school, they became even more worried. He announced that he was now studying games.

In the end, Dr. Nowak turned out all right. He is now the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard. The games were actually versatile mathematical models that Dr. Nowak could use to make important discoveries in fields as varied as economics and cancer biology.

Continue reading “In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution” →

A panel of scientists convened by the country’s leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call “weird life”: organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it.

“The committee’s investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth,” the scientists conclude in their report, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems,” published yesterday by the National Research Council.

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In the corner of a laboratory at Michigan State University, one of the longest-running experiments in evolution is quietly unfolding. A dozen flasks of sugary broth swirl on a gently rocking table. Each is home to hundreds of millions of Escherichia coli, the common gut microbe. These 12 lines of bacteria have been reproducing since 1989, when the biologist Richard E. Lenski bred them from a single E. coli. “I originally thought it might go a couple thousand generations, but it’s kept going and stayed interesting,” Dr. Lenski said. He is up to 40,000 generations now, and counting.

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Eskimo hunters killed a bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska last month and began to chainsaw their way into its blubber. They stopped when the saw hit the tip of an old harpoon lodged deep inside the whale. Historians identified it last week as part of a bomb lance, a harpoon manufactured for only a few years in the late 1800s in New Bedford, Mass. Whalers probably fired it at the bowhead around 1890, when the whale was probably a teenager, and it carried the harpoon for the next 115 years before finally being killed by a modern one.

Continue reading “Take It Slow, Don’t Have Many Kids and Enjoy Cold Water” →