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”
The New York Times, January 8, 2014
Imagine you’re a looking for a place to shoot a monster movie. The plot involves animals kept in suspended animation for seven centuries springing back to life. Chances are you wouldn’t pick South Center Lake for your location. The charming 898-acre lake sits on the outskirts of the small town of Lindstrom, Minn., known as America’s Little Sweden. Gothic it’s not.
But in real life, South Center Lake has become the setting for a remarkable resurrection. Scientists have revived shrimp-like animals that have been buried at the bottom of the lake for an estimated 700 years. If this estimate holds up to further testing, they are the oldest animals ever resurrected.
Continue reading “A Living Time Capsule Shows the Human Mark on Evolution”
It’s hard to believe that Escherichia coli could have any secrets left.
For over a century, scientists have picked the microbe apart–sequencing its genes, cracking its genetic code, running experiments on its metabolism, earning Nobel Prizes off of it, and turning it into, arguably, the most-studied organism in history.
But as deep as scientists dive, they have yet to touch bottom. That’s in part because Escherichia coli is not fixed. It continues to evolve, and even in the most carefully controlled experiments, evolution leaves behind a complicated history. Continue reading “Evolution Hidden in Plain Sight”
Before 1947, a few clippings of Franciscan manzanita had ended up in nurseries. Today you can buy the plant online. But the nursery form is the result of hybridization and extreme breeding; it’s now about as much like wild Franciscan manzanita as a German shepherd is like a wolf. It’s unlikely it could survive in the wild anymore. For thousands of years, wild Franciscan manzanita had grown luxuriantly in the prairies that carpeted much of the California coast. Now the wild plants were all gone–or almost, it turned out.
Before Gluesenkamp’s discovery, the U.S. government officially listed Franciscan manzanita as extinct in the wild. But then three organizations–the Wild Equity Institute, Center for Biological Diversity, and California Native Plant Society–petitioned the U.S. government to change its status. In 2012, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to the request and reclassified Franciscan manzanita from extinct to endangered. Its known wild population was precisely one. Continue reading “Does a Woolly Mammoth Need a Lawyer?”