It’s always a pleasure to talk with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich and their crew at the show Radiolab. For their latest episode, “Black Box,” we talked about the mystery of consciousness and how I got in an argument with my anesthesiologist before I had my appendix taken out.
I’ve embedded the whole episode here:
The New York Times, January 20, 2014
The term “X chromosome” has an air of mystery to it, and rightly so. It got its name in 1891 from a baffled biologist named Hermann Henking. To investigate the nature of chromosomes, Henking examined cells under a simple microscope. All the chromosomes in the cells came in pairs.
All except one.
Henking labeled this outlier chromosome the “X element.” No one knows for sure what he meant by the letter. Maybe he saw it as an extra chromosome. Or perhaps he thought it was an ex-chromosome. Maybe he used X the way mathematicians do, to refer to something unknown.
Daniella Perry writes,
This is an image of a hawk moth and Darwin’s orchid. It spoke to me for its history, beauty, and simplicity, as well as its significance in demonstrating the predictive power of Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. This orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) is endemic to Madagascar and has an unusually long spur (20-35cm), where it keeps its nectar. Charles Darwin predicted in 1862 that even though a moth with an equally lengthy proboscis had not yet been discovered, one must exist in order to pollinate the orchid. Continue reading “The Predicted Tattoo (Science Ink Sunday)”
Influenza strikes every year, but every flu season is rife with uncertainty. In other words, it’s a lot like the weather–important to our lives, and hard to predict. For my new “Matter” column for the New York Times, I take a look at how flu researchers are borrowing the tools of weather forecasting to look into the future–with increasing accuracy. Check it out.
The New York Times, January 16, 2014
Jeffrey Shaman, an environmental health scientist at Columbia University, hopes that he and his colleagues will someday change the nightly news. “The way you get pollution reports and pollen counts on the local weather report, you could also have a flu forecast on there,” said Dr. Shaman.
Each year, the flu season arrives like clockwork. But once it strikes, it can unfold in surprising ways. In 2012, for example, it arrived in November, four weeks ahead of the typical flu season. Some years it can be especially brutal, and in others, very mild. Infection rates may start climbing in some parts of the United States when they are already falling in others.
Continue reading “This Week’s Forecast: What Flu Season May Look Like”