If you have ever struggled through a math class, you may not think of numbers as natural. They may seem more like a tool that you have learn how to use, like Excel or a nail gun. And it’s certainly true that numbers pop in the archaeological record just a few thousand years ago, with the abruptness you’d expect from an invention. People then improved the number system after that, with the addition of zero and other upgrades.

But scientists have found that we are actually born with a deep instinct for numbers. And a new study suggests that our number sense operates much faster than previously thought. It might be better called our number reflex.

Continue reading “We Are Instant Number Crunchers” →

Back in September, when the West African Ebola outbreak was getting worse with every passing week, a lot of people began to worry that the virus could spread by air. And even if it couldn’t spread by air yet, they worried that it might be on the verge of mutating into an airborne form.

When I talked to virus experts, they saw little ground for either concern. The epidemiology of the outbreak, like previous ones, had the sort of pattern you’d expect from a virus that spreads mainly through contact with body fluids. A look at the evolutionary history of viruses indicates that a fluid-adapted virus would be unlikely to switch to going airborne with just a couple mutations. (I wrote in the New York Times about these conversations here and here.)

Continue reading “Is It Worth Imagining Airborne Ebola?” →

As I wrote in the article that accompanied that photograph, the ladybug then does something remarkable: it becomes a bodyguard. It hunches over the wasp and defends it against predators and other species of parasitic wasps that would try to lay their eggs inside the cocoon. Only after the adult wasp emerges from its cocoon does the bodyguard ladybug move again. It either recovers, or dies from the damage of growing another creature inside of it.

How parasites turn their hosts into zombie slaves is a tough question for scientists to answer. In some cases, researchers have found evidence suggesting that the parasites release brain-controlling chemicals. But the wasp uses another strategy: there’s a parasite within this parasite.

Continue reading “Parasitic Wasps Infected with Mind-Controlling Viruses” →

Here are two recent stories about viruses. They started out alike, and ended up very differently.

In October, a woman in Guinea died of Ebola, leaving behind two daughters, one of them two years old, the other five. A relative named Aminata Gueye Tamboura  took the orphaned children back to her home in northwest Mali–a 700-mile journey. Tamboura didn’t know it then, but the younger girl, named Fanta Conde, was infected with Ebola as well. For three days, they traveled on buses and in taxis as Fanta grew ill, developing a scorching fever and a perpetual nosebleed. Soon after arriving in Mali, she died.

Yet Tamboura never became infected with Ebola. Nor did Fanta’s sister or her uncle, who also made the trip. Nor did anyone else who shared the buses and taxis with Fanta, or who encountered Fanta elsewhere on her doomed journey. After Fanta’s death, the entire country of Mali braced for a devastating outbreak. But the outbreak never came.

Continue reading “How The Measles Virus Became A Master of Contagion” →

Each year, billions of people get infected with viruses–with common ones like influenza and cold viruses, and rarer ones like polio and Ebola. The viruses don’t stay all that long inside of us. In most cases, our immune systems wipe them out, except for a few refugees that manage to escape to a new host and keep their species alive. In some cases, the viruses kill their unfortunate hosts, and end their own existence as well. But in some exquisitely rare cases, viruses meld with the genome of their hosts and become part of the genetic legacy their hosts pass down to future generations.

Continue reading “Our Inner Viruses: Forty Million Years In the Making” →