As I browsed the new papers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I was brought up short by this frolicsome picture. It’s a nice example of the visual display of information done right. It shows the spread of primates 55 million years ago across the Northern Hemisphere. I’m always game to learn about what primates were up to in Wyoming and Greenland. But this picture–and the paper that goes with it–have an extra value. They offer some clues to what sort of world we may be creating by pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Category: Blog
If our genes are wired like circuits, does that mean nature is an electrician?
One of the most important sorts of jobs that genes do is to switch other genes on or off. The classic example comes from Escherichia coli, and how it eats milk. (I’m afraid Escherichia coli will be progressively infecting this blog in the months to come, as I finish my new book on this remarkable bug.) Escherichia coli can make the enzymes necessary for digesting lactose, the sugar in milk. But it normally doesn’t, because it makes proteins that clamp onto its DNA next to these genes and prevent gene-reading enzymes from reaching them.
Continue reading “Waiting for the Electrician, or Someone Like Him”
Randy Olson visited the Loom a few months ago in connection with his movie about our national fun and games with evolution and intelligent design, Flock of Dodos. He provoked a lot of discussion with his main point, that biologists were doing a poor job of reaching out to the public. Some skeptics wondered whether accepting Olson’s argument would lead to dumbing science down and engaging in the same bogus PR as creationists. This morning Randy dropped me an email note to point out what he considers a depressing confirmation of his thesis.
It was eight years ago that some computer programmers got together and issued a manifesto for something they called open source software. Conventional software development–kept hidden behind walls of intellectual property, copyright, and secrecy–was clumsy and slow. It would be far better, the open source advocates declared, to make software open to all. It would foster the growth of a vast decentralized community of developers and consumers who could work together to create better software together. Individuals would grab software created by others, tinker with it, and then make it available in turn to the community for more testing and tinkering.
A good article on the importances of big animals helps put the new dodo fossil discoveries in some ecological context. If you can’t bring dodos back, at least bring in the giant tortoises!
Originally published July 11, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.