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”
Travel back far enough in your genealogy, and you will run into a fish.
Before about 370 million years ago, our ancestors were scaly creatures that lived in the sea, swimming with fins and using gills to get oxygen from the water. And then, over the course of millions of years, they began moving ashore, adapting to the terrestrial realm. They became tetrapods, a lineage that would eventually produce today’s amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. As scientists have unearthed fossils from those early days, one lesson has come through ever more loud and clear: the transition was not a single leap. Instead, it was drawn out and piecemeal. Continue reading “How We Got On Land, Bone by Bone”
Writer Jaime Green writes, “Here is my contribution to the collection, my tattoo of the pulsar map from the Voyager golden record, tattooed by the awesome Joseph Ari Aloi. A high point of my life was getting to show it to Frank Drake.”
You can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. (The paperback edition comes out in May; you can pre-order here.) Continue reading “Where Is This Place You Call Earth? (Science Ink Sunday)”
On Monday I wrote here about how scientists could retrace the history of evolutionary change in bacteria they raised in their lab by thawing out ancestors and comparing them to their descendants. That’s a much harder thing to pull off in the wild, but under the right conditions it can be done. Continue reading “After Seven Hundred Years, Crustaceans Rise Again to Show Us How We Steer Evolution”