The photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling the world to take pictures of the oldest living organisms on our planet. She described her journey in this TED talk, and now, at last, she’s created a gorgeous new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Rachel asked if I would write an introduction to the book. After contemplating her photographs and thinking about what these strange Methuselahs mean for us and for science, here’s what I wrote: Continue reading “The Oldest Living Things On Earth” →

The idea of personalized medicine is very simple. Your doctor peruses your genome to tailor your medical treatment. If you get cancer, she compares the genome of your tumor cells to your ordinary genome.

But in between idea and practice are rough waters yet to be crossed. That’s because the genome doesn’t speak for itself. Instead, we will probably need the help of computers with a human-like power to learn. Continue reading “Personalized Medicine: Taming the Big Data Ocean” →

Yesterday I delivered the Director’s Lecture at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Speaking as I was at a lovely green island in a venerable city, I decided to talk about how life evolves in our human-dominated world. My talk ranged from New York City mice to HIV to GM-crop-feasting insects to climate-driven extinctions.

I’ve embedded the video below the fold. The lighting on my is fairly dim, but the slides show up fine and the sound is clear. Below the video, I’ve also embedded the slides for easy viewing. Continue reading “Darwin in the City: My Talk About Humans Driving Evolution” →

It’s hard to truly see the brain. I don’t mean to simply see a three-pound hunk of tissue. I mean to see it in a way that offers a deep feel for how it works. That’s not surprising, given that the human brain is made up of over 80 billion neurons, each branching out to form thousands of connections to other neurons. A drawing of those connections may just look like a tangle of yarn.

As I wrote in the February issue of National Geographic, a number of neuroscientists are charting the brain now in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. And out of these surveys, an interesting new way to look at the brain is emerging. Call it the brain fly-through. The brain fly-through only became feasible once scientists started making large-scale maps of actual neurons in actual brains. Once they had those co-ordinates in three-dimensional space, they could program a computer to glide through it. The results are strangely hypnotic. Continue reading “Flying Through Inner Space” →