It used to be that many people who studied animal behavior thought dogs were too weird to bother with. We had bred them far away from the “natural” state of animals, so their brain had little insight to offer us.

That’s changed a lot in in the past couple decades. We have transformed wolves into some cognitively remarkable creatures, it turns out, and the diversity of breeds we’ve produced can serve as an unplanned experiment in the genetics of social behavior.

Of course, one of the biggest rules in all science is the more data the better. Which in this case means the more dogs that scientists can study, the more they may be able to discover about them.

All of which is introduction to an article I’ve written in today’s New York Times about a new push to gather Big Data about dogs–and to provide some insights from that data to dog-owners themselves. Check it out!

Originally published April 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

If you want to know something about how our ancestors came out of the ocean and onto land, there are just two sorts of fish you should get to know really well. One is the lungfish, our closest aquatic relatives, and the other is the coelacanth, our next-closest. Trout, goldfish, salmon–they are all just distant ray-finned cousins. Lungfish and coelacanths, by contrast, have much in common with us, including a few of the bones that would give rise to our legs and arms. And coelacanths are especially fascinating because until the 1930s, scientists believed that they had gone extinct 65 million years ago. Now they turn out to live off the coasts of both Africa and Indonesia.

Which is why I hope you’ll join me Thursday at 11 am ET to participate in a Google Hangout with a panel of scientists to talk about the latest scientific discoveries about this amazing fish. The occasion is the publication of the coelacanth genome last week.

Continue reading “A most amazing fish: Join our Google Hangout about coelacanths on Thursday” →

I just learned the sad news that the great biologist François Jacob has died. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in the 1950s that showed how cells switch genes off–the first crucial step to understanding how life can use the genome like a piano, to make a beautiful melody instead of a blaring cacophony.

Jacob was also a wonderful writer, and so I had enormous pleasure mining his memoirs for my book Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. I hope this passage gives a sense of what he was like–

Continue reading ““I Think I’ve Just Thought Up Something Important”–François Jacob (1920-2013)” →

Last fall, a 96-year-old man named Ramajit Raghav became a father. No woman could become a mother at 96, or even 76. That’s because women typically lose the capacity to have children around the age 50–not because they become decrepit, not because civilization has poisoned them, but because they undergo a distinct biological transition, known as menopause.

Scientists have debated for years about why menopause exists. Some have argued that it’s a trait that evolved through natural selection in our ancestors. Women who stopped reproducing ended up with more descendants than women who didn’t. Some scientists proposed that older mothers were better off putting all their effort into caring for their children who were already born, rather than having new ones. As their limited supply of eggs deteriorated, they faced a higher risk of miscarriages and even death during childbirth. (In terms of reproduction, men have it easy by comparison: they can make new sperm through their whole life and don’t have to suffer any of the risks of pregnancy.)

Continue reading “Why Menopause?” →