This week: a look at a globalist rodent…
A few years ago I clambered into some of the remoter corners of New York City’s parks with the biologist Jason Munshi-South. I watched him study the city’s wildlife, seeking to understand how New York was sculpting evolution. Out of that experience came an article for the New York Times. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 28, 2016”
The New York Times, October 27, 2016
Millions of them live in New York, and billions more in cities and on farms across the globe. And wherever they scurry, they wreak havoc.
They devour food supplies and contaminate what they don’t eat with feces and urine. They spread a range of harmful viruses and bacteria. In delicate ecosystems around the world, they threaten other species with extinction.
“They’ll gnaw through walls. They’ll gnaw through wires. They’ll destroy cars,” said Jason Munshi-South, a biologist at Fordham University. “They’ve managed to spread wherever there are humans.”
Continue reading “How the Brown Rat Conquered New York City (and Every Other One, Too)”
Last week was a lull, but this week I have a few things to share…
The agricultural revolution that began 11,000 years ago changed humanity as well as the planet. But how did the transformation happen? Some intriguing clues have emerged in recent months from ancient DNA extracted for the first time from the oldest skeletons of farmers. I wrote a feature for the New York Times about the new findings, and how archaeologists are folding them into their understanding of how farming began. (Image: P. Dorrell and S. Laidlaw/The Ain Ghazal Archaeological Project) Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 20, 2016”
STAT, October 20, 2016
Time and again, Martin Moore’s children get sick with a cold. He hauls them to their doctor, who then informs him that there’s nothing to be done aside from taking them home and waiting it out.
The experience is maddening for Moore — especially because he’s a virologist. For everything that virologists have learned about rhinoviruses — the cause of the majority of colds — they have not invented a vaccine for them.
In 2013, Moore wondered if he could make one. He consulted a rhinovirus expert for some advice. Instead, the expert told him, “Oh, there will never be a vaccine for rhinovirus — it’s just not possible.”
Continue reading “Scientists think the common cold may at last be beatable”
The New York Times, October 17, 2016
Beneath a rocky slope in central Jordan lie the remains of a 10,000-year-old village called Ain Ghazal, whose inhabitants lived in stone houses with timber roof beams, the walls and floors gleaming with white plaster.
Hundreds of people living there worshiped in circular shrines and made haunting, wide-eyed sculptures that stood three feet high. They buried their cherished dead under the floors of their houses, decapitating the bodies in order to decorate the skulls.
But as fascinating as this culture was, something else about Ain Ghazal intrigues archaeologists more: It was one of the first farming villages to have emerged after the dawn of agriculture.