Category: Blog
In 1517, the Republic of Venice rebuilt the fortifications protecting the city of Verona. During the construction, strange rocks came to light, looking eerily like seashells and crabs. People had long puzzled over fossils, but for some reason this new discovery left the people of Verona especially intrigued. Perhaps it was the fact that crabs and seashells live in the ocean, which was sixty miles from the city.
Frogs and other amphibians are under attack from a fungus. First observed some two decades ago, the fungus has swept the world and has been implicated in the extinctions of hundreds of species. Yet it’s really only been in the past few years that scientists have started to get a handle on how it makes frogs sick and kills them. In my “Matter” column this week in the New York Times, I take a look at an experiment that offers a glimmer of hope. If frogs don’t get killed by the fungus, they develop some defenses against later infections.
Continue reading “Helping the Frogs Help Themselves Out of Extinction”
Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has been leading an ambitious project over the past few years to create a free high school biology textbook custom-built for the digital age. It’s called Life on Earth.
In 2012 the team released a sample chapter, and they’ve been releasing more since then. Reviewing the project early on for Download the Universe, anthropologist John Hawks had mixed feelings. He praised its beauty and the pleasure derived from toying with its fancy features, while also questioning how well students will learn from the format.
Now the whole project is complete. You can download the entire book for free here. You’ll need an iPad for the full effect, although I’m currently thumbing through it on iBooks on my laptop. In addition, they’ve put some extra materials together for teachers in iTunes U, which you can access from the book link. I’m curious to know what people think. Continue reading “A Free Digital Biology Textbook Is Now Fully Hatched”
The past couple weeks have been a scramble for me (the end of the school year tends to crash like a rogue wave into the lives of parents). During that time, I’ve written a couple new “Matter” columns for the New York Times, both of which concerning how our brains work:
Continue reading “Catching Up: Brains, Writing, and Hot Hands”
There’s a philosophical quandary breeding in your mouth. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have searched for the right way to classify living things. We call living things with feathers “birds,” but we can also divide birds up into smaller groups, like pigeons and storks. We can drill down even further, to different species of pigeons. But it doesn’t feel right to classify birds all the way down to every individual feathered creature on Earth. The fundamental unit of life’s biodiversity has long been the species. Charles Darwin named his book The Origin of Species for a reason.