Games Animals Play

Posted on December 14, 2006April 17, 2020 by admin

Forbes, December 14, 2006

To write about the natural history of games and play, I decided to consult an expert. The other day, as I was twirling my 5-year-old daughter around so that she could pretend she could fly with her fairy wings, I asked her why she likes to play.

Charlotte flew on in silence for a moment. I could tell my question seemed strange to her. “Everyone likes to play,” she said. “Except for grown-ups.”

I suppose the thought of not playing is just too absurd for a 5-year-old to take seriously. Play is a kind of lingua franca for children. Charlotte gets a bit shy when we visit friends, but if there’s a child in the house who’s ready to share a train set or a princess costume, she takes off in a sprint. I might as well have asked her why she eats or sleeps.

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A Fin Is a Limb is a Wing

Posted on November 30, 2006April 17, 2020 by admin

National Geographic, November 30, 2006

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The father of evolution was a nervous parent. Few things worried Charles Darwin more than the challenge of explaining how nature’s most complex structures, such as the eye, came to be. “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” he wrote to a friend in 1860.

Today biologists are beginning to understand the origins of life’s complexity—the exquisite optical mechanism of the eye, the masterly engineering of the arm, the architecture of a flower or a feather, the choreography that allows trillions of cells to cooperate in a single organism.

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Scientist of the Year: Jay Keasling

Posted on November 22, 2006June 10, 2020 by Lori Jia

Discover, November 22, 2006

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Which scientist had the greatest impact in the past year? Mike Brown of Caltech forced astronomers to rethink what a planet is. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago found a key fossil showing how life moved onto land. Emma Whitelaw of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research documented how heredity extends beyond genes. NASA’s James Hansen bolstered the case for global warming and spoke out against government censorship. And these were just some of our finalists.

In the end we zeroed in on one researcher whose work stands out even in this illustrious company. We are pleased to announce Jay Keasling as the winner of DISCOVER’s first Scientist of the Year award.

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Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA

Posted on November 7, 2006April 11, 2020 by Lori Jia

The New York Times, November 7, 2006

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Thanks to advances in DNA technology, scientists can now reconstruct new copies of old viruses. Last year United States government scientists reconstructed the virus that caused the influenza epidemic of 1918. Now a team of French scientists has rebuilt a virus that infected our apelike ancestors several million years ago.

The scientists did not isolate a virus from a fossil. Instead, they examined vestiges of the virus that survive today within the human genome.

About 100,000 segments of human DNA are remarkably similar to retroviruses, a class of viruses that includes HIV. Retroviruses insert a copy of their genes into the genome of their host cell. Scientists estimate that 8 percent of the human genome is made up of this viral DNA, known as human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs.

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Deciphering a deadly attraction

Posted on September 6, 2006April 11, 2020 by Lori Jia

The New York Times, September 6, 2006

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From late summer through early autumn, a gruesome ritual goes into full swing. The praying mantis and its relative, the Chinese mantis, are in their courtship season. A male mantis approaches a female, flapping his wings and swaying his abdomen. Leaping on her back, he begins to mate. And quite often, she tears off his head.

The female mantis devours the head of the still-mating male and then moves on to the rest of his body. “If you put a pair together and come back later, you’ll just find the wings of the male and no other evidence he was ever there,” said William Brown, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia.

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