Hope for Frogs in Face of a Deadly Fungus

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The New York Times, July 9, 2014

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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.

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A Free Digital Biology Textbook Is Now Fully Hatched

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Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has been leading an ambitious project over the past few years to create a free high school biology textbook custom-built for the digital age. It’s called Life on Earth.

In 2012 the team released a sample chapter, and they’ve been releasing more since then. Reviewing the project early on for Download the Universe, anthropologist John Hawks had mixed feelings. He praised its beauty and the pleasure derived from toying with its fancy features, while also questioning how well students will learn from the format.

Now the whole project is complete. You can download the entire book for free here. You’ll need an iPad for the full effect, although I’m currently thumbing through it on iBooks on my laptop. In addition, they’ve put some extra materials together for teachers in iTunes U, which you can access from the book link. I’m curious to know what people think. Continue reading “A Free Digital Biology Textbook Is Now Fully Hatched” →

That’s So Random: Why We Persist in Seeing Streaks

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, June 26, 2014

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From time to time, athletes get on a streak. Suddenly, the basketball goes through the net every time, or a batter gets a hit in every game. This blissful condition is often known as the hot hand, and players have come to believe it is real — so much so that they have made it a part of their strategy for winning games.

“On offense, if someone else has a hot hand, I constantly lay the ball on him,” wrote the N.B.A. legend Walt Frazier in his 1974 memoir, “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool.”

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The Zoo In the Mouth

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DEGAS. SINGER WITH A GLOVE

There’s a philosophical quandary breeding in your mouth. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have searched for the right way to classify living things. We call living things with feathers “birds,” but we can also divide birds up into smaller groups, like pigeons and storks. We can drill down even further, to different species of pigeons. But it doesn’t feel right to classify birds all the way down to every individual feathered creature on Earth. The fundamental unit of life’s biodiversity has long been the species. Charles Darwin named his book The Origin of Species for a reason.

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