A Call to Fight Malaria One Mosquito at a Time by Altering DNA

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The New York Times, July 17, 2014

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Every year, malaria-carrying mosquitoes kill more than 600,000 people, most of them children. Over the centuries, people have battled those mosquitoes in numerous ways, like draining swamps, spraying insecticides and distributing millions of bed nets. And yet malaria remains a menace across much of the world.

In papers published Thursday in the journals Science and eLife, scientists and policy experts propose fighting malaria in a new way: by genetically engineering the mosquitoes themselves.

A new technology for editing DNA may allow scientists to render the insects resistant to the malaria parasite, the authors contend. Or it might be possible to engineer infertility into mosquito DNA, driving their populations into oblivion.

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The New Science of Evolutionary Forecasting

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Quanta Magazine, July 17, 2014

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Michael Lässig can be certain that if he steps out of his home in Cologne, Germany, on the night of Jan. 19, 2030 — assuming he’s still alive and the sky is clear — he will see a full moon.

Lässig’s confidence doesn’t come from psychic messages he’s receiving from the future. He knows the moon will be full because physics tells him so. “The whole of physics is about prediction, and we’ve gotten quite good at it,” said Lässig, a physicist at the University of Cologne. “When we know where the moon is today, we can tell where the moon is tomorrow. We can even tell where it will be in a thousand years.”

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The Old Old Earth

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DETAIL FROM “PALLAS AND THE CENTAUR.” BOTICELLI 1482. (NOTE THE CAREFULLY DETAILED ROCK FACE.) SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

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.

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Why do we have blood types?

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Mosaic, July 14, 2014

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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.

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