Author: Lori Jia
Tiktaalik: music to my ears.
Tiktaalik is the lilting name of a newly discovered fossil fish with fingers. It lived 380 million years ago in the northern reaches of Canada, back when the northern reaches of Canada were tropical coastal wetlands not far from the equator. Tiktaalik’s discoverers (Ted Daeschler, Neil Shubin, and Farish Jenkins) detailed their discovery in back-to-back papers in today’s issue of Nature.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, two new papers add some pieces to the puzzle of how these viruses get into our genomes, and how they affect our health along the way.
The first paper offers a striking portrait of a virus hopping species. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic stumbled across the virus as they were studying prostate cancer that runs in families.
No, there’s nothing wrong with your RSS feed. This blog has just gone very quiet as I’ve become insanely busy with an upcoming talk and my new book project (more on both later). I don’t expect to have time to blog till the first week in April. But I’ll have some delicious items to discuss then.
Originally published March 28, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.
I have a fondness for collecting brain lore–memes about the wonders of the human brain that race around the world for decades. The classic of brain lore is the “ten-percent myth.” As I wrote here, people often claim we only use ten percent of our brain, implying that we’d be supergeniuses if we could just switch on the rest. But that’s just based on a misinterpretation of some studies in the 1930s. Actually, the energy consumed by the cortex is only enough to power one percent of its neurons at any time.
Continue reading “You’re a Dim Bulb (And I mean that in the best possible way)”
Kate Wong, Scientific American’s excellent paleo reporter has a two-parter on the latest dish on Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. No cymbal crashes, I’m afraid, but interesting nonetheless.
Originally published March 22, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.