Yale Environment 360, February 21, 2011
For the last two decades, strange things have been happening to frogs. Some frog populations have high rates of limb deformities, while others have high incidences of what is known as “intersex” — traits associated with both males and females, such as male frogs whose testes contain eggs. Continue reading “Unraveling the Mystery Of The Bizarre Deformed Frogs”
I sat down recently with ecologist David Skelly to talk about the strange things happening to frogs these days. A few years back, scientists found evidence suggesting that pesticides were causing sexual deformities in frogs that lived near farms. Now Skelly is finding that the situation is actually a lot more dire for frogs in suburbs and cities. Over at Yale Environment 360, you can read our Q & A about what sort of chemical cocktail may be making eggs grow in the testes of male frogs–and what it may all mean for us fellow vertebrates.
[Image: Telemudcat at Flickr, Creative Commons License]
Originally published February 21, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Here’s the video of the lecture I gave last week at Stony Brook University, which was the basis of my recent blog post. I’ve uploaded the slides as a pdf here. (You can read the slides online or download them by going to the File drop-down menu.) I’m not sure what the ideal combination of video and slides would be…if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.
[Update–the video url got switched around. This should work now…]
Originally published February 17, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
If you’re interested in language, computers, and human cognition, check out my brother Ben’s first piece for the Atlantic, in which he pops the hype balloon that has inflated around the Watson computer’s performance on “Jeopardy.” Suddenly, my stash of Simpsons trivia has become profound!
Originally published February 17, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Nicholas Wade reports today in the New York Times on a tantalizing study that may offer some insight into the evolution of aging, the subject of my recent Darwin Day lecture. An extended family in Ecuador carries a mutation that seems to leave them completely free of cancer and diabetes. The mutation affects a growth hormone receptor on their cells, so that the cells produce low levels of a growth factor. As I mentioned in my lecture, scientists have studied animals with this same mutation, and they can live to amazingly old ages–the life span of C. elegans worms doubles, for example.