Category: Articles
Wired, April 3, 2014
Antibiotics save lives, but they also wipe out a lot of beneficial organisms that our bodies rely on, says Martin Blaser.
We’re in the midst of an extinction crisis, and it doesn’t involve Siberian tigers. Microbiologist Martin Blaser of New York University School of Medicine says that many species of germs are disappearing from our bodies—and that’s a problem.
Continue reading “Antibiotics Have Turned Our Bodies From Gardens Into Battlefields”
National Geographic, March 28, 2014
It is easy to feel sorry for the gastrotrich. This invertebrate animal, the size of a poppy seed and the shape of a bowling pin, swarms by the millions in rivers and lakes. After it hatches, it takes only three days to develop a complicated body, complete with a mouth, a gut, sensory organs, and a brain. Having reached maturity in just seventy-two hours, the gastrotrich starts laying eggs. And after a few more days, it becomes enfeebled and dies of old age.
To squeeze a whole life into a week seems like one of nature’s more cruel tricks. But that’s only because we are accustomed to measure our lives in decades.
The New York Times, March 27, 2014
When Robert B. Darnell was a graduate student in the early 1980s, he spent a year sequencing a tiny fragment of DNA. Now Dr. Darnell is an oncologist and the president of the New York Genome Center, where the DNA-sequencing machines can decode his grad-school fragment in less than a ten-thousandth of a second.
As an oncologist, Dr. Darnell is firmly convinced that this technological advance will change how cancer is treated. “It’s inspiring for me, and it’s inspiring for lots of doctors,” he said in an interview.
The idea is simple. Oncologists will get a tumor biopsy and have its genome sequenced. They will identify the mutations in the cancer cells, and they will draw up a list of drugs to treat each patient’s particular mix of mutations.
Continue reading “Enlisting a Computer to Battle Cancers, One by One”
The New York Times, March 17, 2014
Signy Island, which lies 375 miles off Antarctica, has too harsh an environment to support a single tree. Its mountains are girdled instead by banks of moss.
“It’s just like a big, green, spongy expanse,” said Peter Convey, an ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey who has worked on Signy Island for 25 years.
Only the top inch of the moss banks is growing. The lack of sunlight turns the older moss brown, and eventually it becomes permanently frozen. Blankets of permafrost have grown on the island for thousands of years, since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age.
The New York Times, March 13, 2014
If Tim Lenton is right, we all owe sponges a deep debt of gratitude. It may be hard to give much credit to these simple animals, which spend their uneventful lives on the sea floor trapping floating bits of food. But Dr. Lenton, an earth systems scientist at the University of Exeter, suspects that sponges played a crucial role in the rise of the animal kingdom.
Some 700 million years ago, he and his colleagues argue, sponges re-engineered the planet. The sponges unleashed a flood of oxygen into the ocean, which before then had scarcely any oxygen at all. Without that transformation, we might not be on earth today.