Knowing your blood types can be a matter of life and death. So you might think that scientists had a clear idea of why we have them in the first place. I’ve written a feature for Mosaic, a new online magazine about medicine, in which I try to get the answer. It proves a lot harder than I expected. Check it out.
In 1517, the Republic of Venice rebuilt the fortifications protecting the city of Verona. During the construction, strange rocks came to light, looking eerily like seashells and crabs. People had long puzzled over fossils, but for some reason this new discovery left the people of Verona especially intrigued. Perhaps it was the fact that crabs and seashells live in the ocean, which was sixty miles from the city.
Mosaic, July 14, 2014
When my parents informed me that my blood type was A+, I felt a strange sense of pride. If A+ was the top grade in school, then surely A+ was also the most excellent of blood types – a biological mark of distinction.
It didn’t take long for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down. But I didn’t learn much more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood. By the time I was an adult, all I really knew was that if I should end up in a hospital in need of blood, the doctors there would need to make sure they transfused me with a suitable type.
Frogs and other amphibians are under attack from a fungus. First observed some two decades ago, the fungus has swept the world and has been implicated in the extinctions of hundreds of species. Yet it’s really only been in the past few years that scientists have started to get a handle on how it makes frogs sick and kills them. In my “Matter” column this week in the New York Times, I take a look at an experiment that offers a glimmer of hope. If frogs don’t get killed by the fungus, they develop some defenses against later infections.
Continue reading “Helping the Frogs Help Themselves Out of Extinction”
The New York Times, July 9, 2014
In the 1990s, a disturbing silence began to settle across the world. From mountain lakes to tropical streams, the music of singing frogs began to disappear.
It took a few years for scientists to figure out what was happening. A species of fungus — Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short — was infecting and killing amphibians.
Two decades later, Bd has proved itself an exceptional biological catastrophe. It afflicts amphibians on every continent, and scientists suspect it has driven hundreds of species to extinction since its discovery.
Continue reading “Hope for Frogs in Face of a Deadly Fungus”