Discover, January 14, 2009

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Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

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Science, January 9, 2009

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An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin’s pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

The only words he published in a book appeared near the end of On the Origin of Species: “Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed,” Darwin wrote.

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Yale Environment 360, January 5, 2009

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Craig Venter is ready for his next incarnation.

In the 1990s, Venter became familiar to the world as a maverick who would sequence the human genome faster and cheaper than a huge team of government scientists. Six years ago he made headlines by announcing his plan to synthesize an entire genome from scratch, insert it into a cell, and manufacture a new species. In both cases, Venter has followed up his promises with some hard results. He published the first gold-standard sequence of an individual’s complete genome (his own). And while he hasn’t made an artificial life form yet, he and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute have achieved a series of landmarks, from synthesizing large chunks of DNA to performing the world’s first “genome transplant” on a microbe.

Continue reading “The High-Tech Search for a Cleaner Biofuel Alternative” →

Discover, December 19, 2008

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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’s the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Keeping track of time is essential for perceiving what’s happening around us and responding to it. In order to tell where a voice is coming from, we time how long it takes for the sound to reach both ears. And when we respond to the voice by speaking ourselves, we need precise timing to make ourselves understood.

Continue reading “How Your Brain Can Control Time” →