Author: admin
In this Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, I have a featureabout clashing visions of the genome. Is it overwhelmingly made up of “junk”–pieces of DNA that provide us with no useful function–or is it rife with functional pieces that we have yet to understand? Or is the reality of the genome a confusing mixture of the two?
The New York Times, March 5, 2015
T. Ryan Gregory’s lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario is a sort of genomic menagerie, stocked with creatures, living and dead, waiting to have their DNA laid bare. Scorpions lurk in their terrariums. Tarantulas doze under bowls. Flash-frozen spiders and crustaceans — collected by Gregory, an evolutionary biologist, and his students on expeditions to the Arctic — lie piled in beige metal tanks of liquid nitrogen. A bank of standing freezers holds samples of mollusks, moths and beetles. The cabinets are crammed with slides splashed with the fuchsia-stained genomes of fruit bats, Siamese fighting fish and ostriches.
The 92nd St. Y in New York is presenting “Seven Days of Genius” this week. As part of the festivities, the video site Big Think invited me to film a conversation with neuroscientist Heather Berlin about the nature of genius and the origin of creativity in the brain.
Here’s the video, which we taped at YouTube headquarters:
If you have ever struggled through a math class, you may not think of numbers as natural. They may seem more like a tool that you have learn how to use, like Excel or a nail gun. And it’s certainly true that numbers pop in the archaeological record just a few thousand years ago, with the abruptness you’d expect from an invention. People then improved the number system after that, with the addition of zero and other upgrades.
But scientists have found that we are actually born with a deep instinct for numbers. And a new study suggests that our number sense operates much faster than previously thought. It might be better called our number reflex.
The New York Times, March 2, 2015
Thirty-four years ago, doctors in Los Angeles discovered that some of their patients were succumbing to a normally harmless fungus. It soon became clear that they belonged to a growing number of people whose immune systems were hobbled by a virus, eventually known as human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V.
To date, an estimated 78 million people have become infected, 39 million of whom have died.
As the true scale of the virus’s devastation began to emerge, a number of scientists set out to investigate its origins. Piece by piece, year after year, the scientists reconstructed its history. Their research slowly revealed that the virus did not make a single leap from animals, but several.
Continue reading “Two Strains of H.I.V. Cut Vastly Different Paths”