Category: Articles

The Wired Atlas of the Human Ecosystem

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WIRED, September 27, 2011

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If some twisted genius vaporized all 10 trillion cells in your body — along with the hair, the fingernails, and other tissue they create — it would not leave empty space behind. A body-shaped cloud made of bacteria, viruses, and other former stowaways would hover briefly in the air. The cloud would outline your skin, delineate your lungs, trace your digestive tract. You might be gone for good, but your shadow biosphere would remain.

We got our first glimpse of these tiny tenants — now known collectively as the microbiome — in the late 17th century, when a Dutch lens grinder named Anton van Leeuwenhoek noticed a layer of white scum between his teeth.

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“I See,” Said the Blind Man With an Artificial Retina

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, September 15, 2011

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For 100 million people around the globe who suffer from macular degeneration and other diseases of the retina, life is a steady march from light into darkness. The intricate layers of neurons at the backs of their eyes gradually degrade and lose the ability to snatch photons and translate them into electric signals that are sent to the brain. Vision steadily blurs or narrows, and for some, the world fades to black. Until recently some types of retinal degeneration seemed as inevitable as the wrinkling of skin or the graying of hair—only far more terrifying and debilitating. But recent studies offer hope that eventually the darkness may be lifted.

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Horwich Wins Lasker Award by Straddling Science and Medicine

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The New York Times, September 12, 2011

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NEW HAVEN — Medicine is a divided world. On one side are the doctors, who come face to face with illness each day and try to heal their patients with whatever tools they can get their hands on. On the other are the researchers, who explore the body’s microscopic complexity, never sure whether their discoveries will ever end up in the hands of the doctors.

Dr. Arthur Horwich, a medical geneticist at Yale University, lives in both worlds. “I’ve always been on the fence between science and medicine,” he said. “I could never make up my mind.”

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Ignorance Is No Comfort

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Slate, September 8, 2011

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Dear Art—

Is Contagion a public health campaign? I don’t think so. The Centers for Disease Control didn’t produce it; Hollywood did. It’s a movie—but it’s a movie for which the creators talked to people who actually deal with viruses and epidemics. And for that, I give them a lot of credit. It’s rare to find a movie that tries to show what scientists actually do, rather than putting an actor in a lab coat and having him fight bug-faced aliens.

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Climate Relicts: Seeking Clues On How Some Species Survive

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Yale Environment 360, August 29, 2011

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A two-hour’s drive north of Madrid is an extraordinary sight: forests of beech trees. It’s not the European beech itself that’s extraordinary. After all, Fagus sylvatica grows across a wide swath of the continent. It’s beech trees in central Spain that are strange. To grow, beeches require a moist, relatively cool climate — a climate that’s almost impossible to find in central Spain. “They’re limited to cool moist valleys in a hot, dry mountain range,” explains Alistair Jump, an ecologist at the University of Stirling who studies the trees.

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