Category: Articles

Twenty-first-century anatomy lesson

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Nature, January 16, 2008

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Six hundred years ago, anatomists were rock stars. Their lessons filled open-air amphitheatres, where the curious public rubbed shoulders with medical students. While a surgeon sliced open a cadaver, the anatomist, seated above on a lofty chair, deciphered the exposed mysteries of the bones, muscles and organs.

Modern anatomists have retreated from the stage to windowless medical-school labs. They have ceded their public role to geneticists unveiling secrets encrypted in our DNA. Yet anatomists may be poised for a comeback, judging from Your Inner Fish. Neil Shubin, a biologist and palaeontologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, delves into human gristle, interpreting the scars of billions of years of evolution that we carry inside our bodies.

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Migration, Interrupted: Nature’s Rhythms at Risk

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The New York Times, January 1, 2008

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The world is etched with invisible paths, the routes taken each year by uncountable swarms of geese, elk and salmon, of dragonflies, zebras and leatherback turtles.

Their migrations speak to us in some unfathomably deep way. Birders flock to stopover sites like Cape May, N.J., to watch birds on their journeys to the far north in the spring and back to the tropics in the fall. Eco-tourists head for the Serengeti to train binoculars on herds of wildebeest that stretch to the horizon. American schoolchildren watch monarch butterflies hatch from chrysalises in their classrooms and then see them off on their trip to Mexico.

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Meteorites May Have Fostered Life on Earth

Posted on by Lori Jia

WIRED, December 20, 2007

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About 470 million years ago, back when our ancestors were jawless fishes and the land was ruled by insects, Earth was pounded by a series of enormous meteorites. The traces of that hammering still survive today in ancient rocks in southern Sweden and central China, where scientists have found exotic mineral grains found only in meteorites.

By measuring the amount of the grains in the rocks, the scientists calculated the rate of meteorite impacts jumped by a factor of 100 around 470 million years ago. A number of the impacts were big enough to leave 20-mile craters. The energy unleashed was 10 million times greater than the energy in the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

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Scientist Employs ‘Circuit Theory’ to Protect Endangered Species

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WIRED, December 12, 2007

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When we enter the wilderness, we like to leave the nonstop whir of electronics behind. The worlds of the mountain lion and of the integrated circuit seem to have nothing in common. But in fact, they are similar in some profound ways. Over the years, as mountain lions migrate and mate, their DNA flows across the landscape like electrons flowing around a circuit.

By borrowing some engineers’ insights about how circuits work, ecologists now have a promising new tool for helping conserve mountain lions and other threatened species.

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Fin Whale at Feeding Time: Dive Deep, Stop Short, Open Wide

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, December 11, 2007

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The word “big” doesn’t do justice to whales. Humpback whales can weigh up to 40 tons. Fin whales have been known to reach 80 tons. Blue whales, the biggest animals to have ever lived, reach 160 tons–the same mass as about 2,000 grown men or 5 million grown mice.

It takes a lot of food to build such giant bodies, but how exactly the biggest whales get so much has long been a mystery. “We don’t have much of a sense of these animals in their natural environments,” said Nick Pyenson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

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