The New York Times, March 1, 2005

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A team of Dutch scientists is trying to solve the mystery of personality. Why are some individuals shy while others are bold, for example? What roles do genes and environment play in shaping personalities? And most mysterious of all, how did they evolve?

The scientists are carrying out an ambitious series of experiments to answer these questions. They are studying thousands of individuals, observing how they interact with others, comparing their personalities to their descendants’ and analyzing their DNA.

Continue reading “Looking for Personality in Animals, of All People” →

The New York Times, February 8, 2005

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In the world of competitive eating, it’s time to crown a new champion.

Even the fastest human eaters need a few seconds to consume a piece of food. The current record for devouring hard-boiled eggs, for example, is 65 eggs in 6 minutes 40 seconds, by Sonya Thomas of Alexandria, Va. That works out to about six seconds an egg.

But according to a report last week in the journal Nature, Ms. Thomas and her fellow record-holders must step aside to make room for the star-nosed mole, a bizarre creature that lives in wetlands in the Eastern United States.

Continue reading “Underground Gourmet: Mole Sets a Speed Record” →

The New York Times, January 11, 2005

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Dr. Steven A. Benner is bracing for what could be a spectacular year. When the Huygens mission parachutes into the hazy skies of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, he will be among the researchers anxiously awaiting a report.

After several days, Dr. Benner and his colleagues will receive the Huygens measurements of Titan’s chemical composition. They will comb through the data to see whether the moon harbors life.

But Dr. Benner, a professor of chemistry at the University of Florida, will not limit his search to familiar life forms of the sort that exist on Earth. He is casting a wider net, in hopes of discovering creatures that defy conventional biology — what Dr. Benner calls “weird life.”

Continue reading “In the Search for Life on Titan, the Challenge Will Be Recognizing It” →

The New York Times, January 11, 2005

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The Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson believes that he has solved a 487-year-old ecological mystery.

In 1518, a spectacular plague of ants devastated some of the earliest Spanish settlements in the New World on the island of Hispaniola. The Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas recorded how entire plantations were wiped out “as though fire had fallen from the sky and scorched them.” Despite the scale of the destruction, the identity of the plague ants has never been discovered.

Continue reading “Plague Ants, Plantains and Scorched Plantations” →

The New York Times, December 30, 2004

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Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right.The notion that natural selection can create long-term trends toward large size first emerged about a century ago, but it fell out of favor in recent decades. Now researchers have taken a fresh look at the question with new methods, and some argue that these trends are real.

Biologists have recently found that in most animals and plants, bigger individuals are more successful at reproducing than smaller ones, whether they are finches, damselflies or jimsonweed.

Continue reading “In evolution, size does matter” →