Author: Lori Jia

Can Hermaphrodites Teach Us What It Means To Be Male?

Posted on by Lori Jia

The Evolution Institute, January 4, 2015

Link

The vinegar worm (officially known as Caenorhabditis elegans) is about as simple as an animal can be. When this soil-dwelling nematode reaches its adult size, it measures a millimeter from its blind head to its tapered tail. It contains only a thousand cells in its entire body. Your body, by contrast, is made of 36 trillion cells. Yet the vinegar worm divides up its few cells into the various parts you can find in other animals like us, from muscles to a nervous system to a gut to sex organs.

Continue reading “Can Hermaphrodites Teach Us What It Means To Be Male?” →

How We Know Space

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, December 4, 2014

Link

The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we have—from the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the sky—makes sense only if we can assign it a location. “We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space,” he wrote in 1781.

Try it yourself: A world without space just does not seem to make sense. But for some people it is everyday life. Strokes can rob us of space. So can brain injuries and tumors.

Continue reading “How We Know Space” →

Making Time

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, December 4, 2014

Link

Whenever I lose my watch, I take my sweet time to get a new one. I savor the freedom from my compulsion to carve my days into minute-size fragments. But my liberty has its limits. Even if I get rid of the clock strapped to my wrist, I cannot escape the one in my head. The human brain keeps time, from the flicker of milliseconds to the languorous unfurling of hours and days and years. It is the product of hundreds of millions of years of relentless evolution.

Continue reading “Making Time” →

The Evolution of Sleep: 700 Million Years of Melatonin

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, October 2, 2014

Link

As much as we may try to deny it, Earth’s cycle of day and night rules our lives.

When the sun sets, the encroaching darkness sets off a chain of molecular events spreading from our eyes to our pineal gland, which oozes a hormone called melatonin into the brain. When the melatonin latches onto neurons, it alters their electrical rhythm, nudging the brain into the realm of sleep.

At dawn, sunlight snuffs out the melatonin, forcing the brain back to its wakeful pattern again.

Continue reading “The Evolution of Sleep: 700 Million Years of Melatonin” →

A Tiny Emissary From the Ancient Past

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, September 25, 2014

Link

In the early 1920s, farmers in New Jersey noticed their potatoes were shriveling, their leaves becoming deformed. The plants were sick with an illness that came to be known as potato spindle tuber disease. But it took almost five decades for someone to find the cause.

In 1971, Theodor O. Diener, a plant pathologist at the Department of Agriculture, discovered that the culprit is an inconceivably tiny pathogen — one-80th the size of a virus. Dr. Diener called it a viroid.

Since Dr. Diener’s initial discovery, scientists have identified nearly three dozen species of viroids that attack crops from tomatoes to coconuts, as well as flowers such as dahlias and chrysanthemums.

Continue reading “A Tiny Emissary From the Ancient Past” →