A couple weeks ago, All Things Considered asked me to talk about the deaths in 2013 of three Nobel-prize winning scientists: Francois Jacob, Frederick Sanger, and David Hubel. I had blogged about Jacob’s death in April, and reflecting on his career in conjunction with those of Sanger and Hubel was a thought-provoking experience. In some ways, these three scientists seemed worlds apart–Jacob poring over bacteria feeding on sugar, Sanger tearing apart insulin molecules, and Hubel using electrodes to eavesdrop on neurons in the brains of cats.

But what unites them all, I think, was their ability to use the very simple scientific tools available to scientists in the 1950s to open up vast realms of biological complexity–from the orchestral activity of the genome to the reality-building network of cells in our brains.

Continue reading “The Scientists We Lost in 2013” →

For my new  “Matter” column for the New York Times, I take a look at a new idea to explain that mystery between our ears. Our brains are enormous for our body size, and our minds are capable of extraordinary feats of cognition. Two neuroscientists have offered up a hypothesis that links these two facts, suggesting how an increase in brain size could have led to a change in how the brain is networked. Check it out.

You may also want to check out P.Z. Myers’s critique of the “tether hypothesis” on his blog Pharyngula. He raises some important questions about the idea, based on his own experiences as a neuroscientist. I’m puzzled, though, why he decided to kick it off with this swipe at me:

Continue reading “Untethering the Brain” →

The title of my blog post is provocative, I know, but I’m actually just lifting it from the title of a new commentary in the journal Molecular Psychiatry by Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. In his piece, Insel expresses his excitement about a new way of thinking about how genes can contribute to our risk of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. It’s based on an emerging understanding of the human genome that I explored in a recent story for the New York Times: each of us does not carry around a single personal genome, but many personal genomes.

Continue reading ““The Dark Matter of Psychiatric Genetics”” →

There’s more news on the ancient human DNA front: as I report in my new “Matter” column in the New York Timesmy new “Matter” column in the New York Times, scientists have now reconstructed the genome of a Neanderthal with exquisite accuracy. Their genome sequence is as good as what you’d get if you had your own genome sequenced with the finest equipment available today. And yet the DNA comes from a fossil that’s approximately 130,000 years old.

Continue reading “An Up-to-Date Neanderthal Genome Fits Into the Web of Humanity” →

A year ago today, Phenomena was launched, and I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for reading the work of Virginia Hughes, Brian Switek, Ed Yong, and myself over these past 365 days. The Loom has seen a lot of homes in its ten years, but Phenomena has been the best, I must say, from its delightful design to the support of people at National Geographic such as Jamie Shreeve and Brian Howard.

In case you’re curious, here are the ten most-read posts I wrote here over the past year:

Continue reading “A Phenomena(l) Year!” →