Recently I had the pleasure of working on two videos that are now online. I’ve embedded them under the fold.

First up is an animation from TED-ED. I worked with them on a piece explaining where new genes come from, based on some of my articles (such as this and this).

There’s a unity to life. Sometimes it’s plain to see, but very often it lurks underneath a distraction of differences. And a new study shows that there’s even a hidden unity between our slipped disks and the muscles in a squirming worm.

Scientists call this unity “homology.” The British anatomist Richard Owen coined the term in 1843, sixteen years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.  Owen defined homology as “the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.” For example, a human arm, a seal flipper, and a bat wing all have the same basic skeletal layout. They consist of a single long bone, a bending joint, two more long bones, a cluster of small bones, and a set of five digits. The size and shape of each bone may differ, but the pattern is the same regardless of how mammals use their limbs–to swim, to fly, or to wield a hammer.

Continue reading “What Slipped Disks Tell Us About 700 Million Years of Evolution” →

Buried deep within the body of a whale, underneath the heaps of muscles and tendons, lie some little, lonely bones. They are whale hips–and they are one of the stranger examples of evolution’s transforming power. Perhaps kinkier is a better word.

Continue reading “The Erotic Endurance of Whale Hips” →

Many people think of coffee simply as an absolute necessity in the morning. But it’s also a fascinating piece of natural history. Here we have a plant that produces a potent chemical–caffeine–that can snap our brains to attention in low doses and kill us in big doses. Why on Earth would some Ethiopian bean go to such great lengths? For my Matter column this week in the New York Timesmy Matter column this week in the New York Times, I take a look at a new study that offers some answers.

Continue reading “Coffee: Millions of Years of Poison and Brain Manipulation” →

If you’re looking for something to read this weekend, here are a couple pieces I’ve written in the past few days:

1. Epigenetics are cool. Mind-controlling parasites are cool. Epigenetics + mind-controlling parasites = Very cool. That equation is the subject of my latest column for the New York Times.

2. Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. In honor of that event, I’ve written a piece for National Geographic News about why its demise still means so much to scientists a century later.

For more on the passenger pigeon, check out this previous post from the Loom, as well as this feature I wrote last year for National Geographic. A number of other writers are also marking tomorrow’s anniversary–for example, Elizabeth Kolbert at the New Yorker,  David Biello at Scientific American, and John Fitzpatrick in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times.

Continue reading “Catching up: A Hundred Years Without Passenger Pigeons, and the Secrets of the Puppet Masters” →