Around 11,000 years ago, humans first set foot in the driest place on Earth.

The Atacama Desert straddles the Andes Mountains, reaching into parts of Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. Little rain falls on the desert — some spots haven’t received a single drop in recorded history.

But the people who arrived at the Atacama managed to turn it into a home. Some Atacameños, as they are known today, fished the Pacific. Others hunted game and herded livestock in the highlands. They mummified their dead, decorating them with ceremonial wigs before leaving them in the mountains.

Continue reading “An Unlikely Driver of Evolution: Arsenic” →

Last month, a team of scientists announced what could prove to be an enormous step forward in the fight against H.I.V.

Scientists at Scripps Research Institute said they had developed an artificial antibody that, once in the blood, grabbed hold of the virus and inactivated it. The molecule can eliminate H.I.V. from infected monkeys and protect them from future infections.

But this treatment is not a vaccine, not in any ordinary sense. By delivering synthetic genes into the muscles of the monkeys, the scientists are essentially re-engineering the animals to resist disease. Researchers are testing this novel approach not just against H.I.V., but also Ebola, malaria, influenza and hepatitis.

Continue reading “Protection Without a Vaccine” →

T. Ryan Gregory’s lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario is a sort of genomic menagerie, stocked with creatures, living and dead, waiting to have their DNA laid bare. Scorpions lurk in their terrariums. Tarantulas doze under bowls. Flash-frozen spiders and crustaceans — collected by Gregory, an evolutionary biologist, and his students on expeditions to the Arctic — lie piled in beige metal tanks of liquid nitrogen. A bank of standing freezers holds samples of mollusks, moths and beetles. The cabinets are crammed with slides splashed with the fuchsia-stained genomes of fruit bats, Siamese fighting fish and ostriches.

Continue reading “Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?” →

Thirty-four years ago, doctors in Los Angeles discovered that some of their patients were succumbing to a normally harmless fungus. It soon became clear that they belonged to a growing number of people whose immune systems were hobbled by a virus, eventually known as human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V.

To date, an estimated 78 million people have become infected, 39 million of whom have died.

As the true scale of the virus’s devastation began to emerge, a number of scientists set out to investigate its origins. Piece by piece, year after year, the scientists reconstructed its history. Their research slowly revealed that the virus did not make a single leap from animals, but several.

Continue reading “Two Strains of H.I.V. Cut Vastly Different Paths” →

The turquoise killifish lives in a fleeting world: the ponds that appear only during the rainy season in East Africa.

As a new pond forms, turquoise killifish eggs buried in the mud spring from suspended animation. The eggs hatch, and in just 40 days the fish grow to full size, about 2.5 inches. They feed, mate and lay eggs. By the time the ponds dry up, the fish are all dead.

Even when hobbyists pamper them in aquariums, turquoise killifish survive only a few months, making them among the shortest-lived vertebrates on Earth. So the turquoise killifish may not seem the best animal to study to discover the secrets of a long life.

Continue reading “In Short-Lived Fish, Secrets to Aging” →