Behold the ribosome, one of life’s hideously tangled molecular masterpieces. You couldn’t live without it, and the same goes for all living things on Earth. It might seem impossible to reconstruct the evolution of such a complex thing that emerged over 3.5 billion years ago. But according to an intriguing new hypothesis, the ribosome’s evolution may turn out to be elegantly simple. You can read about it in my latest guest post on the Origins Blog.

Image: Wikipedia  

Originally published February 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

Meg, a graduate student in physiology and pharmacology, writes, “It’s a starburst lilly with DNA as a stem to symbolize that everything originates from genetics!”

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Originally published February 20, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

[Correction appended]

Monday I bemoaned the lack of fact-checking of opinion pieces in newspapers, pointing to a George Will column on global warming in the Washington Post as evidence. Now the Washington Post op-ed folks claim that it was in fact heavily fact-checked. All I can say is that none of them better apply for a fact-checking job here at Discover.

To recap: George Will wrote a column in which he tried to downplay the evidence that global warming has already affected the Earth, and that it will have bigger impacts in the future. Various bloggers have pointed out examples where Will misrepresented scientific studies in this column.

Continue reading “The Sea Ice Affair, Continued” →

There are two things I really like to learn about: parasites and the human mind. And so I was intrigued to learn about some studies that suggest that we defend ourselves from infections not only with an immune system made up of cells and antibodies, but one made up of unconscious behaviors. It’s the topic of my new column about the brain in Discover. Other people can make us sick, and so perhaps we deal with them differently depending on our risk of getting sick. Take this study, from Carlos Navarrete, a psychologist at Michigan State University. He and his colleagues designed an experiment to compare how pregnant women respond to strangers. During the first trimester, both mother and child are particularly vulnerable to infection.

Continue reading “Parasites On the Mind” →