Toe Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, December 18, 2013

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Scientists have extracted the entire genome of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal from a single toe bone in a Siberian cave, an accomplishment that far outstrips any previous work on Neanderthal genes.

The accuracy of the new genome is of similar quality to what scientists would achieve if they were sequencing the DNA of a living person.

“It’s an amazing technical accomplishment,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, an expert on human evolution at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “Twenty years ago, I would have thought this would never be possible.”

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In Search of the First Animals

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All animals–from Corgis to Greenland sharks, from dog ticks to toucans to you–descend from a common ancestor. The fossil record of animals, which runs back over 600 million years, can help us travel back some of the way through animal evolution towards the origin of the kingdom. But those early rocks contain precious few remains of animals, and so fossils alone can’t tell us what our common animal ancestor looked like.

Scientists can add to their supply of clues by studying living animals. And it now looks as if some of the most important clues to how animals got their start come from a beautiful creature called the comb jelly. This video from the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a good introduction to their luminescent loveliness.

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Learning From the History of Vitamins

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The New York Times, December 12, 2013

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Our health depends on vitamins, and to understand that dependency, it helps to understand the history of vitamins. As I wrote in an article in Science Times this week, our ancestors have probably needed vitamins for billions of years. By studying how we and other species make vitamins, scientists hope to find new ways to keep us healthy — perhaps even by using vitamins as a weapon against our enemies.

There are two ways of getting those vitamins: making them or eating them. Our microbial ancestors probably made many of their vitamins, but later much of that ability was lost. Our primate ancestors lost the ability to make their own vitamin C about 60 million years ago.

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What the Evolution of Vitamins Means For Human Health

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On Tuesday I wrote a feature for the New York Times about the four-billion-year history of vitamins on Earth. Today, in my “Matter” column for the TimesToday, in my “Matter” column for the Times, I look at the lessons that history can teach us for improving human health. My favorite one is learning how to use vitamins as weapons against our invisible enemies. Check it out.

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The Smell of Evolution

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Evolution drives relentlessly forward, leaving behind a messy wake. One of the best places to survey its sloppy creativity is inside your nose.

When you smell a lily or a cigar or a jug of spoiled milk, you are grabbing their molecules out of an ocean of air. You have exposed nerve endings dangling deep inside your nostrils, each of which is studded with proteins called olfactory receptors. Each neuron is covered in one type of receptor, the shape of which allows it to grab tightly onto certain odor molecules and weakly to others, while letting many others drift by.

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