The Steller’s sea cow is gone. This mega-manatee swam the North Pacific for millions of years, and then in the 1700s humans hunted them to extinction. Today on the front page of the New York Times, I write about a warning from a team of scientists that if we keep on doing what we’re doing now–industrializing the ocean and pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in greater and greater amounts–a lot of other marine animal species will go the way of the Steller’s sea cow.

Yet this story is actually a fairly hopeful one. The scientists compared the pace of extinctions at sea to those on land and found that the oceans are basically where the land was in 1800–with relatively few extinctions yet, on the verge of massive changes to the habitat that could wreak much bigger havoc. The oceans still have a capacity to recover, if we choose to let them.

Continue reading “Sitting on a Cliff Vs. Falling Off a Cliff” →

Like me, you may be snuffling with a cold today. You’re infected–typically in your nose–with a virus. The dominant cold-causing virusers are known as rhinoviruses, and they’re quite lovely. Here’s I’ve embedded a video of one, which lets you orbit the virus like you’re visiting an alien moon:

(The video is based on this 2014 study of the structure of the rhinovirus shell.)

Continue reading “The common–and fairly awesome–cold virus” →

Human sexuality is obviously complicated. But it’s a mistake to think that, if you could somehow strip away human culture, sex would get simple. Even if you could find the simplest animal out there with a sex life, you wouldn’t find that imaginary simplicity.

This week I’ve written an essay on just such an animal, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans. With only a thousand cells in its entire body, the worm is unquestionably simple But it’s also arguably the best-studied animal on the planet. And yet its sex life–featuring self-fertilizing hermaphrodites with some males on the side–remains bizarrely mysterious.

I’ve written an essay for the online magazine Evolution: This View of Life on C. elegans, its strangely complicated sex life, and how that sex life–like other things in biology–is only starting to make sense in the light of evolution. Check it out.

Continue reading “A Very Different Kind of Selfie” →