Friday’s Elk, June 24, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Greetings from Durham!

Durham isn’t quite the brutal oven that Austin was, but it’s pretty sultry. I’m here for the annual International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health meeting. I gave a plenary talk about reporting on evolutionary medicine. Some stories virtually write themselves, while others, on tricky concepts like imprinting, require a lot of wrestling. With my talk over, I get to enjoy a couple days of presentations about research about everything from sex chromosomes to mountain sickness. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 24, 2016” →

Memory researchers were rebuffed by science, and came roaring back

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STAT, June 23, 2016

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NEW YORK — Andre Fenton got to design his lab when he joined the Center for Neural Science at New York University a few years ago, and he made sure that he had a lot of closet space. But his closets do not contain brooms or shoes.

Each one is lined with black curtains and has wires and cameras hanging from the ceiling. In the middle of each closet is a disk where Fenton places mice or rats. As the rodents explore the arena, they soon discover that one section delivers a shock. It’s a lesson they don’t soon forget.

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Cancer Is Contagious Among Clams. What About Us?

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The New York Times, June 22, 2016

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The ocean contains a vast number of living things, including many, many pathogens — from bacteria that thrive on coral to fungi that infect lobsters. A drop of seawater may hold 10 million viruses.

Recently, a team of scientists revealed a frightening member of this menagerie: free-floating cancer cells that cause contagious tumors in shellfish. Last year, they found one such cancer in a species of clam. On Wednesday, they reported that three more species were plagued with contagious cancers.

The cancers are specific to shellfish and do not appear to pose a danger to humans who eat them.

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Are Hobbits Real?

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, June 20, 2016

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A reader asks: Scientists seem to be calling members of a 3-foot-tall species whose fossils were recently found in Indonesia “hobbits” conversationally. When did this term come into existence? Before or after Tolkien? And how might the “real” hobbits have been similar to or different from the ones Tolkien created?

Carl Zimmer, who writes the Matter column for The Times’s Science section, considers the question.

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Friday’s Elk, June 17, 2016

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Greetings from Austin!

I’m broiling under the Texan sun on a visit to the Society for the Study of Evolution’s annual meeting. Last night I gave the Stephen Jay Gould Prize lecture, about our changing picture of human evolution. I talked about the articles I’ve written about in recent newsletters, on exciting new fossils and insights from DNA. In the 1970s, Gould pushed his readers to appreciate human evolution as a bush, rather than a simplistic march of progress. With lots of new fossils found since then, the human evolutionary trees is even more ramified. And all the interbreeding revealed in ancient DNA over the past 100,000 years between humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other mysterious hominins has complicated our family tree even more. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 17, 2016” →