Animals have been smelling for hundreds of millions of years, but the evolution of that sense is difficult to trace. You can’t ask an elephant to describe the fragrance of an acacia tree, for example, nor can you ask a lion if it gets the same feeling from a whiff of the same plant.

So scientists have to gather indirect clues to how different species use their noses. One way is to run simple tests on animals, seeing if they show an ability to tell different odors apart. Elephants, for example, can tell the difference between the smells of as many as 30 different members of their extended family.

Continue reading “The Tree of Smells” →

Some of my friends are sporting wristbands these days that keep track of their bodies. Little computers nestled in these device inside record the steps they take each day, the beats of their heart, the length of their slumbers. At the end of each day, they can sit down at a computer and look at their data arrayed across a screen like a seismogram of flesh.

I got one of these devices as a gift recently. But as much as I enjoy wasting time with technology, I just didn’t care enough to put it on my wrist. I already know that I should run more, walk more, stand more, and avoid sitting in front of monitors more. I don’t need granular data to remind me of that.

But as I read the journal Genome Biologythe journal Genome Biology today, I decided that someday I might surrender to the Quantified Self movement. I’ll just have to wait till I can track my trillions of microbes from one day to the next.

Continue reading “The Quantified Microbiome Self” →

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been checking back in with a couple of my favorite lines of scientific research in my New York Times column.

–Last week, I wrote about how life will (or won’t) adapt to climate change. A new experiment suggests that some species may have more potential to evolve resistance to the new conditions than previously thought. But we don’t know if that will be enough.

This is just one way in which we humans are now driving evolution in new directions. Here’s a video of a lecture I gave on the subject a few months ago at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum:

Continue reading “Hot Flies and Mosaic Parents” →