Humans Driving Evolution of the Spotted Salamander

Posted on by admin

Environment Yale, July 31, 2012

Link

“There’s some hopping going on here,” says Steve Brady.

Brady is mucking through a pond. His hair, black dusted with gray, swirls over his forehead. He wears hip-high wading boots, which keep him dry as he wobbles in the deep mud and negotiates downed logs. The pond he’s slogging through sits on the eastern edge of Westwoods, a forest preserve in Guilford, Conn. Piles of tumbled granite boulders and stands of maples rise over the water. Long-legged mosquitoes drift around Brady, looking for a patch of skin. Water striders flit along the pond’s surface to get out of his way. A frog croaks from time to time.

Continue reading “Humans Driving Evolution of the Spotted Salamander” →

Flu That Leapt From Birds to Seals Is Studied for Human Threat

Posted on by admin

The New York Times, July 31, 2012

Link

Four times in the past century, a new strain of flu has emerged that can spread quickly in humans. One of those strains, which emerged in 1918, killed an estimated 50 million people.

All human flu strains evolved from flu viruses that live in birds. To understand how these transitions happen, scientists have recently been tinkering with a strain of bird flu to see how many mutations it takes until its spreads from mammal to mammal.

When news of their efforts emerged last fall, a fierce debate broke out about the wisdom of publishing the experiments in full.

Continue reading “Flu That Leapt From Birds to Seals Is Studied for Human Threat” →

The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

Posted on by Carl Zimmer

This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Published by Scientific American.

Guest reviewed by Jaime Green

July 30, 2012

Continue reading “The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze” →

Why You Can’t Fake A Good Horn

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Next month, my first co-authored book is coming out. Evolution: Making Sense of Life is a textbook for biology majors, and my co-author is Doug Emlen, a professor at the University of Montana. I’ve heard many tales of disastrous collaborations between scientists and science writers, and so I don’t enter into them lightly. But working with Emlen has been a delight. No matter how many times we’ve had to rewrite a chapter, he threw himself into the work as if he was cannonballing into a swimming pool. And yet somehow Emlen was advancing his own research in evolutionary biology at the same time, quietly chugging away on some remarkable experiments. And today–just a week after we shipped our book off to the printers–Emlen’s latest, most intriguing paper has just come out in the journal Science.

Continue reading “Why You Can’t Fake A Good Horn” →