Category: Blog
Today, Phenomena gains a phenomenal new member: Maryn McKenna. If you’ve read her books such as Superbug or kept up with her blog of the same name, you know that nobody does a better job of analyzing the threats we face from infectious diseases. To celebrate the launch of “Germination,” her blog here at Phenomena, I asked Maryn some questions about how she got here, and where she’s headed.
Continue reading “Please Welcome Maryn McKenna to Phenomena!”
Parasites are life’s great success story, abundant in both species and sheer numbers. One secret to their success is the ability that many parasites have to manipulate their hosts. By pulling strings like a puppet master, they use their hosts to advance towards their own goal of planetary conquest. Creepy is the best word to describe most of their strategies. They turn some hosts suicidal. They castrate others. They turn still others into zombie bodyguards. But a new study published today suggests that the parasite that causes malaria may use a more pleasant strategy. It lures mosquitoes to infected hosts with a lemony scent.
In May 2010, a whale showed up on the wrong side of the world.
A team of marine biologists was conducting a survey off the coast of Israel when they spotted it. At first they thought it was a sperm whale. But each time the animal surfaced, the more clearly they could see that it had the wrong anatomy. When they got back on land, they looked closely at the photographs they had taken and realized, to their shock, that it was a gray whale. This species is a common sight off the coast of California, but biologists had never seen one outside of the Pacific before.
Aviad Scheinin, one of the marine biologists on the survey, posted the news on the web. “Nice Photoshopping,” someone replied.
Three weeks later, Scheinin got one more bit of news about the whale. It was photographed off the coast of Spain, having traveled 1864 miles. Then it disappeared.
In this Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, I have a featureabout clashing visions of the genome. Is it overwhelmingly made up of “junk”–pieces of DNA that provide us with no useful function–or is it rife with functional pieces that we have yet to understand? Or is the reality of the genome a confusing mixture of the two?
The 92nd St. Y in New York is presenting “Seven Days of Genius” this week. As part of the festivities, the video site Big Think invited me to film a conversation with neuroscientist Heather Berlin about the nature of genius and the origin of creativity in the brain.
Here’s the video, which we taped at YouTube headquarters: