Category: Newsletter

Friday’s Elk, September 23, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen
Out of Africa: What the Genomes Say

Back in December, when I was working on a profile of the geneticist Eske Willerslev, he told me off the record that he and his colleagues had a huge new genome paper in the works that would offer a lot of clues about human history. But it would take a while to come out because similar papers were going to be published at the same time by other scientists.

Well, the wheels turn slowly, but they were worth the wait. On Thursday’s front page of the New York Times, I reported on four new studies that give an unprecedented look at our origins. There was a whole lot to write about–more than can fit in one article, so I focused on one of the most contentious questions in paleoanthropology: how did humans emerge out of Africa and settle the rest of the world? Some fascinating possibilities emerge from these new studies on hundreds of genomes. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 23, 2016” →

Friday’s Elk, September 2, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen
A Life (And Death?) In the Trees

You’ve probably heard about Lucy. She’s a 3.2-million-year-old relative of ours, a bipedal ape who only stood three feet tall. She’s famous for the discovery of her partial skeleton in 1974, a discovery that enabled scientists to learn a lot about her life, and about her species, Australopithecus afarensis. Now a team of scientists has put forward evidence about how she died: by a long fall from a tree. If they’re right, her death might actually tell us a lot about her life, too–and about how we evolved to walk upright. But hold on–as I wrote in the New York Times on Monday–a number of other experts don’t think the scientists have made a compelling case. Regardless of how she died, however, this research has led to something pretty exciting: you can download the 3-D scans of some of Lucy’s bones and print out replicas.
 

Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, September 2, 2016” →

Friday’s Elk, August 26, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Hard believe it, but here’s the last Friday’s Elk of summer vacation…
 

The Amazing Axolotl

I recently paid a visit to the lab of Jessica Whited, an assistant professor in the orthopedic surgery department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Whited doesn’t study people. Instead, she studies a spooky salamander called the axolotl. What makes the axolotl amazing is that it can regrow and entire leg in a matter of days. Whited is studying its powers of regeneration in the hopes of finding lessons that doctors can apply to people, coaxing our own bodies to fix themselves. I profile Whited in my latest “Science Happens!” video for Stat. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, August 26, 2016” →

Friday’s Elk, August 19, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Front page news this week!
 

Hands and Fins, Twenty Years Later

Twenty years ago, scientists were starting to study evolution in a new way: by picking apart the genes that govern the development of animals. Reporting on their work for Discover at the time, I was incredibly excited to watch the research unfold. Scientists could generate hypotheses about genetic changes that occurred millions of years ago, giving rise to new structures like limbs and wings. This new field of “evo-devo,” as it was sometimes called, helped inspire me to write my first book, At the Water’s Edge. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, August 19, 2016” →