Category: Articles

The First, and Greatest, Reality Show: Evolutionary Biology

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, November 23, 2009

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Anne Gaskett, a Cornell University biol­ogist, spends her days crouching quietly next to orchids in Australia. It may seem like an uneventful way to pass the time, but she is actually observing a marvelous act of sexual deception. The flowers are fooling wasps into making love to them.

Male wasps normally seek out females by sniffing for their pheromones, signaling chemicals that they produce. Each species makes a unique pheromone, which means that male wasps rarely end up with the wrong females.

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Humanity’s Other Basic Instinct: Math

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Discover, November 17, 2009

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Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt.

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Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life

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The New York Times, October 5, 2009

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Deep down, we are all cannibals. Our cells are perpetually devouring themselves, shredding their own complex molecules to pieces and recycling them for new parts. Many of the details of our endless self-destruction have come to light only in the past few years. And to the surprise of many scientists, links are now emerging between this inner cannibalism and diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

“There’s been an explosion,” said Daniel Klionsky of the University of Michigan. “All of a sudden, researchers in different fields are seeing a connection.”

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Are We Alone?

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Popular Mechanics, October 1, 2009

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There are many strange landscapes in the solar system, but perhaps none stranger than that of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Deserts blanket Titan for hundreds of miles, rippling with wind-sculpted dunes that rise more than 300 ft. Images taken by the Cassini spacecraft over the past two years also reveal riverbeds sculpted by liquid methane, canyons, and what appear to be a volcano and a shoreline. When Cassini dropped the Huygens probe onto Titan’s surface in 2005, the 701-pound craft landed in a substance with the consistency of wet sand. Shrouding it all is a smoggy, orange-hued atmosphere 10 times thicker than Earth’s and made up of complex organic molecules.

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Can Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street

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The New York Times, September 28, 2009

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Evolutionary biologists have long wondered if history can run backward. Is it possible for the proteins in our bodies to return to the old shapes and jobs they had millions of years ago?

Examining the evolution of one protein, a team of scientists declares the answer is no, saying new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. “They burn the bridge that evolution just crossed,” said Joseph W. Thornton, a biology professor at the University of Oregon and co-author of a paper on the team’s findings in the current issue of Nature.

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