Author: Lori Jia

Is This Chip Educable?

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, March 10, 2002

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Biologists tolerate a level of mystery in their work that would drive your average engineer or computer programmer crazy. They’ve put together a complete rough draft of the human genome but they have little understanding of how those 40,000 or so genes work together to make a human. They’ve mapped every muscle and nerve in a fly’s wings, yet still struggle to explain how it keeps from crashing into a wall. No engineer would build a DVD player without knowing what every circuit was for; no programmer would let a computer write its own code. Or at least that’s how things used to be. As Peter J. Bentley demonstrates in “Digital Biology,” the cool, rational temple of technology is becoming infested with biology’s weedy enigmas.

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Do Parasites Rule the World?

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, August 1, 2000

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On a clear summer day on the California coast, the carpinteria salt marsh vibrates with life. Along the banks of the 120-acre preserve, 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, thousands of horn snails, their conical shells looking like miniature party hats, graze the algae. Arrow gobies slip through the water, while killifish dart around, every now and then turning to expose the brilliant glint of their bellies. Fiddler crabs slowly crawl out of fist-size holes and salute the new day with their giant claws, while their bigger cousins—lined-shore crabs— crack open snails as if they were walnuts. Meanwhile, a carnival of birds— Caspian terns, willet, plover, yellowleg sandpipers, curlews, and dowitchers— feast on littleneck clams and other prey burrowed in the marsh bottom.

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The El Niño factor

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 31, 1999

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When 1998 began, East Africa should have been at its most beautiful. Normally the short rainy season ends in December, the rivers subside, and the country sparkles; farmers raise crops, animals graze, tourists go on safaris. But this year was different. The rains were heavy and long. The water spread out for miles in places in Kenya and Somalia, cutting off villages and forcing herders to crowd with their livestock onto a few patches of dry land. Things quickly turned ugly. Camels, cows, sheep, and goats all started dying of violent fevers. Soon people, too, began to get sick. Some went temporarily blind; others began bleeding uncontrollably.

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Into the night

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, November 30, 1998

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Nancy Simmons went down to the jungles of French Guiana in 1991 with the seemingly simple mission of determining how many species of bats live in one place. Each afternoon she and her colleagues headed out from their camp and set up their nets, sometimes arranging them artfully over the openings of hollowed trees where bats like to roost. Then they waited for the sun to fall.

“The forest is noisy and active at night,” says Simmons. “Armadillos come walking by, and kinkajous are knocking around in the trees above your head. You sit there in the dark and you wait, and you never know what is going to come next.”

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How many more eurekas in the bath?

Posted on by Lori Jia

Nature, November 12, 1998

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One can only imagine how annoyed John Maddox must have become in 1996. He had retired from Nature a year earlier, after an impressive 23-year stint as its editor. Having successfully guided this journal into the age of space-based telescopes and genome projects, he decided it was a good time to write a book. There he would lay out the most important questions still left unanswered by scientists. And then, just as he was getting elbow-deep in the project, everyone suddenly started talking about another book on what the future will bring: John Horgan’s The End of Science (Helix, 1996).

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