From Darwinius to GMOs: Journalists Should Not Let Themselves Be Played

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

I don’t like starting the weekend in a state of infuriation, but here we are.

On Wednesday, French scientists had a press conference to announce the publication of a study that they claimed showed that genetically modified food causes massive levels of cancer in rats.

The paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. That being said, outside experts quickly pointed out how flimsy it was, especially in its experimental design and its statistics. Scicurious has a good roundup of the problems at Discover’s The Crux.

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Irish cannibals and Neanderthal sex: Just how big is our species?

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

When the first fossils of Neanderthals came to light 155 years ago, they raised a tough question: did they come from a member of our own species, or a separate one?

For all the progress scientists have made in studying Neanderthals since then, the answer remains tough–in part because it’s not that easy to define a species.

NOVA asked me to write about this enduring question. You can read my answer here.

Originally published September 21, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

Are Neanderthals Human?

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

NOVA, September 20, 2012

Link

In August 1856, in the German valley of Neander—Neanderthal in German—men cutting limestone for the Prussian construction industry stumbled upon some bones in a cave. Looking vaguely human, the bones—a piece of a skull, portions of limbs, and fragments of shoulder blades and ribs—eventually made their way to an anatomist in Bonn named Hermann Schaafhausen.

Schaafhausen pored over the fossils, observing their crests and knobs. He noticed that the bones had the overall shape you’d expect from a human skeleton. But some bones had strange features, too. The skullcap, for example, sported a heavy brow ridge, hanging over the eyes like a boney pair of goggles. It was, at once, human and not.

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The Birth of the New, The Rewiring of the Old

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

In 1988, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist now at Michigan State University, launched the longest running experiment on natural selection. It started with a single microbe–E. coli–which Lenski used to seed twelve genetically identical lines of bacteria. He placed each line in a separate flask, which he provisioned with a scant supply of glucose. The bacteria ate up the sugar in a few hours. The next day, he took a droplet of microbial broth from each flask and let it tumble into a new one, complete with a fresh supply of food. The bacteria boomed again, then starved again, and then were transferred again to a new home. Lenski and his colleagues have repeated this procedure every day for the past 24 years, rearing over 55,000 generations of bacteria.

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