The Famine Ended 70 Years Ago, but Dutch Genes Still Bear Scars

Posted on by Zimmer

The New York Times, January 31, 2018

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In September 1944, trains in the Netherlands ground to a halt. Dutch railway workers were hoping that a strike could stop the transport of Nazi troops, helping the advancing Allied forces.

But the Allied campaign failed, and the Nazis punished the Netherlands by blocking food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine. By the time the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died of starvation.

The Dutch Hunger Winter has proved unique in unexpected ways.

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You Are Shaped by the Genes You Inherit. And Maybe by Those You Don’t.

Posted on by Zimmer

The New York Times, January 25, 2018

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For centuries, people have drawn the line between nature and nurture.

In the nineteenth century, the English polymath Francis Galton cast nature-versus-nurture in scientific terms. He envisioned a battle between heredity and experience that shapes each of us.

“When nature and nurture compete for supremacy…the former proves the stronger,” Galton wrote in 1874.

Today, scientists can do something Galton couldn’t imagine: they can track the genes we inherit from our parents. They are gaining clues to how that genetic legacy influences many aspects of our experience, from our risk of developing cancer to our tendency to take up smoking.

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Friday’s Elk January 20, 2018

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Some muskoxen weigh over a thousand pounds. They’re hard animals to miss–that is, if you’ve hopped in a snow machine and traveled across an Arctic tundra for a few hours in search of a herd. But to understand muskoxen there’s no alternative but to be where they live. You can’t Google-Earth your way to insight.

This week in the New York Times, I wrote about Joel Berger, a biologist who has spent a lot of time looking at muskoxen over the past decade. Berger’s research has revealed a worrying vulnerability in these polar giants. Climate change may starve pregnant muskoxen mothers. You can read the whole story here. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk January 20, 2018” →

In the Arctic, More Rain May Mean Fewer Musk Oxen

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, January 18, 2018

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It’s hard to miss a musk ox: It looks like a buffalo decked out in a hairy fur coat. And yet this easy-to-spot giant, which lives on tundras from Siberia to Greenland, is still surprisingly mysterious.

“Here is the largest land mammal of the polar zones, but we hardly know anything about musk oxen,” said Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University and a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Dr. Berger has studied musk oxen in Alaska for nearly a decade, and on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, he and his colleagues reported a disturbing finding: Musk oxen are unexpectedly vulnerable to rapid climate change in the Arctic.

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Friday’s Elk January 12, 2018

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

This week I went to Minneapolis to speak about science writing at a conference at the University of Minnesota. I wanted to mention one of my favorite novels in the talk, Moby-Dick. My view of Melville’s book has evolved from my days as a college English major to my current existence as a science writer. I’ve grown increasingly fond of the “cetology” chapters, in which Melville veers away from the story of Ishmael to explore the biology of whales. In 2013, I was asked by the Los Angeles Public Library to write an essay on the subject for an online celebration of the novel. I wanted to put a link to the essay on a slide for my Minnesota talk, but I discovered that the whole site for the project had disappeared. Such is the tenuous legacy of writers in the digital age. So I fished the piece out of my hard drive and revived it on Medium. You can read it here. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk January 12, 2018” →