The surprising history of the war on superbugs — and what it means for the world today

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STAT, September 12, 2016

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We may come to the end of antibiotics. We may run clean out of effective ammunition, and then how the bacteria and moulds will lord it.”

If you had to guess where those words came from, you might well say a recent news segment on TV, or perhaps an op-ed published by a frantic doctor. After all, these days there’s a lot of talk about our antibiotic resistance crisis. Bacteria that have evolved to withstand antibiotics kill 700,000 people each year, and ever more powerful strains are spreading around the world.

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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.
 

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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

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” →