Congratulations to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this morning. They won for their discovery of telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep them from degrading and ward off aging. The Nobel site has posted some useful information about why this was such a profound discovery.
Originally published October 5, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, October 5, 2009
Deep down, we are all cannibals. Our cells are perpetually devouring themselves, shredding their own complex molecules to pieces and recycling them for new parts. Many of the details of our endless self-destruction have come to light only in the past few years. And to the surprise of many scientists, links are now emerging between this inner cannibalism and diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
“There’s been an explosion,” said Daniel Klionsky of the University of Michigan. “All of a sudden, researchers in different fields are seeing a connection.”
Continue reading “Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life”
Meet Ardipithecus.
This introduction has been a long time coming. Some 4.4 million years ago, a hominid now known as Ardipithecus ramidus lived in what were then forests in Ethiopia. Fifteen years ago, Tim White of Berkeley and a team of Ethiopian and American scientists published the first account of Ardipithecus, which they had just discovered. But it was just a preliminary report, and White promised more details later, once he and his colleagues had carefully prepared and analyzed all the fossils they had unearthed. “Later,” it turned out, meant 15 years. Continue reading “Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last”
Popular Mechanics, October 1, 2009
There are many strange landscapes in the solar system, but perhaps none stranger than that of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Deserts blanket Titan for hundreds of miles, rippling with wind-sculpted dunes that rise more than 300 ft. Images taken by the Cassini spacecraft over the past two years also reveal riverbeds sculpted by liquid methane, canyons, and what appear to be a volcano and a shoreline. When Cassini dropped the Huygens probe onto Titan’s surface in 2005, the 701-pound craft landed in a substance with the consistency of wet sand. Shrouding it all is a smoggy, orange-hued atmosphere 10 times thicker than Earth’s and made up of complex organic molecules.
I had a sudden drop in blood pressure when I checked out the new issue of Nature today. Evolutionary biologist Laurence Hurst wrote a two-book review: Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and my own The Tangled Bank. I revived when I saw that my book held up under Hurst’s comparison: “The book is billed as the first textbook on evolution for the general reader, and in that framework, it excels.”