A 3.2-Million-Year-Old Mystery: Did Lucy Fall From a Tree?

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The New York Times, August 29, 2016

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In 1974, the paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson led an expedition to Ethiopia to look for fossils of ancient human relatives.

In an expanse of arid badlands, he spotted an arm bone. Then, in the area surrounding it, Dr. Johanson and his colleagues found hundreds of other skeletal fragments.

The fossils turned out to have come from a single three-foot-tall female who lived 3.2 million years ago. The scientists named her species Australopithecus afarensis, and the skeleton was dubbed Lucy.

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Friday’s Elk, August 26, 2016

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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” →

We’re all different in our DNA. We’re finally starting to understand when those differences matter

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STAT, August 17, 2016

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I know it sounds strange, but I feel very grateful to a database. It saved me from a lifelong fear of dropping dead because my heart will give out.

The database is known as ExAC, and I had my first experience with it after I got my genome sequenced. For a few weeks, I brought it from one lab to another to ask scientists to help me make sense of it.

Their analysis brought up a doozy of a finding. I have a variant in a gene for heart muscles, called DSG2. Some studies have indicated that having a variant in just one of your two copies of DSG2 can cause a rare condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy.

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From Fins Into Hands: Scientists Discover a Deep Evolutionary Link

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The New York Times, August 17, 2016

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To help his readers fathom evolution, Charles Darwin asked them to consider their own hands.

“What can be more curious,” he asked, “than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?”

Darwin had a straightforward explanation: People, moles, horses, porpoises and bats all shared a common ancestor that grew limbs with digits. Its descendants evolved different kinds of limbs adapted for different tasks. But they never lost the anatomical similarities that revealed their kinship.

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