Vitamins are one of those features of life that we take for granted. For some odd reason, we must obtain trace amounts of a dozen or so tiny molecules, or we will get very, very sick. To understand why this is so, you have to look back at the history of vitamins. And that history stretches back pretty much to the origin of life, a history whose traces we can see in our own DNA, and one that has shaped the balance of nature. For more, check out my feature in tomorrow’s New York Times (I’ll have more to add in my “Matter” column for the Times on Thursday).
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Speaking To My Madness: How I Searched For Myself In Schizophrenia. By Roberta Payne.
Reviewed by Thomas Levenson
December 5, 2013
The New York Times, December 4, 2013
Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries.
In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.
The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story.
Continue reading “Baffling 400,000-Year-Old Clue to Human Origins”
I can still remember back in 1997 being shocked that a team of scientists had managed to extract a few hundred bases of DNA from a 40,000 year old Neanderthal fossil. Neanderthal DNA! In the years that followed, scientists made huge advances in recovering ancient DNA, with the entire Neanderthal genome published in 2010. But for all that amazement, I had to learn to be resigned that scientists probably wouldn’t get human DNA older than about 100,000 years. Beyond that vintage, the DNA was just too busted up to be recoverable.
Wrong. Very wrong.
Continue reading “An Ancient, Mysterious Scrap of Human DNA”
The Atlantic, December 2013
On April 28, 2009, a box containing a newly isolated virus showed up at Doris Bucher’s lab. She and her colleagues at New York Medical College opened it up right away. Thousands, or perhaps millions, of lives might depend on what they did next.
The virus was a new kind of influenza, known as 2009 H1N1. It had abruptly started spreading across North America in the previous month, and was beginning to appear in countries around the world. Once scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed it, they realized that the vaccine already in production for the next flu season probably wouldn’t be effective against it. And because it was so new, people’s immune systems might also be unable to stop the virus, which meant that it could become a global outbreak—a pandemic.