Category: Articles

Now: The Rest of the Genome

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The New York Times, November 11, 2008

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Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word “gene.” Dr. Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. “It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back,” she said.

But Dr. Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein.

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Mom and Dad Are Fighting in Your Genes—and in Your Brain

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, November 10, 2008

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Sometimes the best way to learn how the brain works is to watch what happens when it goes awry. When one part—a clump of neurons or a brain-building gene—doesn’t do what it is supposed to, the brain may fail in an illuminating way. Its failure may even expose some of the hidden foundations of the mind.

Neuroscientists have recently become fascinated with a particularly telling pair of rare brain disorders. One was identified in 1965 by English physician Harry Angelman, who was struck by the faces of three children he treated. These children were always smiling and often laughing.

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Understanding octopus, cuttlefish and other camouflage champions

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, November 9, 2008

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WOODS HOLE, Massachusetts — The cuttlefish in Roger Hanlon’s laboratory were in fine form. Their skin was taking on new colors and patterns faster than the digital signs in Times Square.

Hanlon inspected the squidlike animals as he walked past their shallow tubs, stopping from time to time to ask, “Whoa, did you see that?”

One cuttlefish added a pair of eye spots to its back, a strategy cuttlefish use to fool predators. The spots lingered a few seconds, then vanished.

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Searching for Intelligence in Our Genes

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Scientific American, October 31, 2008

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In Robert Plomin’s line of work, patience is essential. Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, wants to understand the nature of intelligence. As part of his research, he has been watching thousands of children grow up. Plomin asks the children questions such as “What do water and milk have in common?” and “In what direction does the sun set?” At first he and his colleagues quizzed the children in person or over the telephone. Today many of those children are in their early teens, and they take their tests on the Internet.

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The Evolution of Extraordinary Eyes: The Cases of Flatfishes and Stalk-eyed Flies

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Evolution: Education and Outreach, October 16, 2008

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The history of life is an unbroken stream of evolution stretching over 3.5 billion years. In order to study it—and in order to describe it—it must be carved into episodes. If scientists want to understand the origin, say, of bats, they do not run experiments to test a hypothesis about how DNA first evolved on the early Earth. They do not do research on the transition from single-celled protozoans to the first animals 600 million years ago. Likewise, they do not get bogged down with bat evolution after bats first evolved—how, for example, bats spread around the world and how they coevolved with their prey. There is only so much time in the day.

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