Author: Lori Jia
You may be familiar with Pulse of the Planet as a radio show about nature, but Jim Metzner, its producer, just let me know that it now sports a pretty extensive web site, including a selection of diaries from scientists studying everything from lightning to sea turtles. Check it out.
Originally published September 17, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
“Attached is a photo of a tattoo I got immediately after turning in the final paperwork a little over two weeks ago for the completion of my Ph.D. in biological anthropology. It’s the first evolutionary tree that Darwin sketched in his 1837 Notebook B on the transmutation of species.” –Julienne
We’re up to 64 tattoos in the flickr set, which has been seen by over 96,000 people since I set it up last month (which doesn’t count the 130,000+ pageviews of the original post). I think I’ll just post my favorite of the week each Friday until people stop sending them to me.
Continue reading “I’m Thinking of Calling It Science Tattoo Friday”
The New York Times, September 12, 2007
There are times when life imitates art. Then there are times when life imitates science fiction.
One of the more famous monsters in film history is the extraterrestrial beast of the “Alien” series. It slowly opened its glistening fangs to reveal a second set of jaws that shot forward to kill its victims.
Scientists have now discovered a fish that does the same thing.
Rita Mehta did not have aliens in mind when she began to study the moray eel. Mehta, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, where she studies the evolution of feeding, was intrigued by the dining habits of morays.
Continue reading “Moray eels: The predator that always bites twice”
The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives–professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow’s New York Times about moray eels. It turns out that they have bizarre jaws hidden in their throats that catapult forward into their mouth to grab prey.
Continue reading “Alien Eels, Pufferfish, and Other Novelties”
What do human spit, baker’s yeast, and fly sex have in common? Together, they illustrate a way in which new kinds of genes evolve.
Scientists published a paper in Nature Genetics Sunday in which they studied an enzyme called amylase that’s produced in saliva and breaks down starch. Human amylase genes share a common ancestry with the amylase gene found in our close relative, the chimpanzee. But they are different in some important ways. Instead of one amylase gene, we have several. Human amylase genes range from 2 to 15 copies, averaging three times as many as chimpanzees.
Continue reading “Today’s Odd Bedfellows: Spit, Yeast, and Mating Flies”