Sometimes a virus can cause more devastation than all the world’s armies. In 1918, at the end of World War I, influenza spread around the planet, reaching even Pacific islands and Arctic villages. The virus infected a third of all people on earth, and caused an estimated 50 million deaths — more than three times  the number of people killed in World War I.

Since 1918, four new global flu pandemics have struck. None have come anywhere close to 1918’s toll, leaving scientists to puzzle about why 1918 was so deadly.

Adding to the mystery was that people in their late 20s were at greatest risk of dying in 1918. Typically, children and old people are more likely to die in flu outbreaks.

Continue reading “In 1918 Flu Pandemic, Timing Was a Killer” →

Each of us carries just over 20,000 genes that encode everything from the keratin in our hair down to the muscle fibers in our toes. It’s no great mystery where our own genes came from: our parents bequeathed them to us. And our parents, in turn, got their genes from their parents.

But where along that genealogical line did each of those 20,000 protein-coding genes get its start?

That question has hung over the science of genetics ever since its dawn a century ago. “It’s a basic question of life: how evolution generates novelty,” said Diethard Tautz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany.

Continue reading “The Continuing Evolution of Genes” →