I will be on the public radio show The Takeaway at 7:20 am EST Tuesday to talk about fireflies. I’ll update this post with a link to the podcast when it’s online. [And here it is.]
Originally published June 30, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Fireflies are the topic of my story on the cover of the New York Times science section tomorrow. It’s the result of a visit I paid last Friday evening to a meadow in Massachusetts, where I listened to Sara Lewis of Tufts University explain the sultry, complex tale of sex, deception, and death that was playing out in front of me.
I first got to know Lewis’s work last summer, when I decided I wanted to include fireflies in my next book, The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Lewis co-authored a fascinating review of firefly biology last year (free pdf from Lewis’s web site). I particularly liked this chart, which shows how different species have evolved different flash signals.
The New York Times, June 29, 2009
LINCOLN, Mass.–Sara Lewis is fluent in firefly. On this night she walks through a farm field in eastern Massachusetts, watching the first fireflies of the evening rise into the air and begin to blink on and off. Dr. Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University, points out six species in this meadow, each with its own pattern of flashes.
Along one edge of the meadow are Photinus greeni, with double pulses separated by three seconds of darkness. Near a stream are Photinus ignitus, with a five-second delay between single pulses. And near a forest are Pyractomena angulata, which make Dr. Lewis’s favorite flash pattern. “It’s like a flickering orange rain,” she said.
As a science writer, I often find it sobering to read scientific history. Science works slowly, even though we wish it would work in nanosecond breakthroughs.
In 1913, for example, a Russian scientist named Nikolai Anichkov ran an experiment in which he had egg yolks fed to rabbits. On this cholesterol-heavy diet the rabbits developed atherosclerosis. The more cholesterol the rabbits ate, the bigger the deposits on their blood vessels became. It was a tremendous discovery, considered by some one of the greatest in medical history.
Continue reading “Genomes In Newsweek: Futures Near and Far”
Newsweek, June 27, 2009
Ten years ago, the human genome was medicine’s holy grail. Playing the part of King Arthur’s knights were rival teams of biologists racing to sequence all the genetic instructions required to make a human being. And just as the actual Holy Grail was believed to have miraculous healing powers, some promised that the genome would change medicine forever. Biotech companies raced to cash in—Human Genome Sciences, for instance, filed patents on 100,000 genes and, in 1999, saw its stock quadruple. But genomic science didn’t deliver fast breakthroughs. Today Human Genome’s stock price is down below $3, and its vast patent portfolio looks like overkill, considering that a human has only about 20,000 genes altogether.