Greetings–
I’ve got a new video out in my Science Happens series for Stat. This time, I paid a visit to the lab of Chris Mason in New York, where he and his colleagues are studying blood and other samples from astronaut Scott Kelly. They’re examining his DNA to see if life in space brings about any changes in how his genes work. Check it out. (GIF from NASA) Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, May 13, 2016”
The New York Times, May 12, 2016
Animal migrations combine staggering endurance and exquisite timing.
Consider the odyssey of a bird known as the red knot. Each spring, flocks of the intrepid shorebirds fly up to 9,300 miles from the tropics to the Arctic. As the snow melts, they mate and produce a new generation of chicks. The chicks gorge themselves on insects, and then all the red knots head back south.
“They are there less than two months,” said Jan A. van Gils, an ecologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “It’s a very tight schedule.”
Continue reading “Climate Change and the Case of the Shrinking Red Knots”
Greetings–
I’m back, with some further reading for your enjoyment and edification (I hope!).
Have you ever heard of Wolbachia? If not, you have a wonderful surprise in store. It’s arguably the most successful symbiont on Earth, a species of bacteria that lives inside several million species of invertebrates. And it thrives in those hosts with weird manipulations of their reproduction. I’ve written about Wolbachia a few times in the past (here for example), and this week in the New York Times I revisit it to explore an exciting possibility: that Wolbachia could block mosquito-borne diseases including Zika and dengue fever. Check it out. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, May 6, 2016”
The New York Times, May 4, 2016
If there is ever a contest for Least Appreciated Creature on Earth, first prize should go to a microbe called Wolbachia.
The bacterium infects millions of invertebrate species, including spiders, shrimps and parasitic worms, as well as 60 percent of all insect species. Once in residence, Wolbachia co-opts its hosts’ reproductive machinery and often greedily shields them from a variety of competing infections.
Ever since the Zika outbreak began in Brazil last year, scientists have suspected that Wolbachia might protect mosquitoes from the virus.
Continue reading “Bacteria-Infected Mosquitoes Could Slow Spread of Zika Virus”
Greetings–
It’s a short email today. Also, a head’s up that I won’t be sending out a Friday’s Elk next week. I’ll be back in touch in May. Happy Spring!
About nine thousand years ago, gray foxes arrived on California’s Channel Islands. They’ve since evolved into a new species–a tiny animal that’s smaller than a house cat. In my column this week in The New York Times, I write about a new study that peers into their genomes–and finds next to no genetic variation. How they’ve survived with that kind of DNA is a mystery. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, April 22, 2016”