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.
The New York Times, August 29, 2016
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.
Continue reading “A 3.2-Million-Year-Old Mystery: Did Lucy Fall From a Tree?”
Hard believe it, but here’s the last Friday’s Elk of summer vacation…
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”
Front page news this week!
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”
STAT, August 17, 2016
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.