The New York Times, April 22, 2013
In 1995, Brian Hare began to wonder what his dog Oreo was thinking.
At the time, he was a sophomore at Emory University, where he was studying animal psychology with Michael Tomasello. Dr. Tomasello was comparing the social intelligence of humans and other animals.
Humans, it was known at the time, are exquisitely sensitive to signals from other humans. We use that information to solve problems that we might struggle to figure out on our own.
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.)
The ancient Greeks believed that the constellation Gemini represented the twin horsemen Castor and Pollux. According to one version of the story, Castor was an ordinary human, while Pollux, the son of Zeus, lived forever. Castor was mortally wounded during a battle, whereupon Zeus offered Pollux a choice: he could let Castor die or he could give his brother half his immortality. Pollux chose to save his brother, and forever afterwards they would spend a day Olympus followed by a day in Hades.
“My twin brother died from suicide in 2011,” writes Zach Poynter. He chose to memorialize his brother with two tattoos on his arm. One is of the constellation Gemini. The other is of DNA. “We were identical twins, thus sharing the same DNA (although not expressing it the same way!)” Poynter writes.
You can read about the science of that paradox here and here. And you can see the rest of the Science Tattoo Emporium here or in my book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
Originally published April 14, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.