If you sometimes look around and ask yourself, “So what is life, anyway?”–even if you haven’t ingested some illegal substance–you may be interested in a story I’ve written for Seed magazine. “The Meaning of Life” is the cover story for the August issue, which just turned up at my doorstep. The story isn’t online yet, but when it does pop up, I’ll make a note of it.

The idea for the story crystallized during the course of my work on my next book. My initial idea for the book was to investigate this very question, “What is life?” There is actually a lot of new research and thinking going into this ancient puzzle. But I recognized that I probably would not come out of such a vast enterprise alive, or at least with my wits intact.

Continue reading “Starts with L, Rhymes with Rife” →

Last November, scientists announced they had revived a virus that had been dead for millions of years. The virus belongs to a special class that multiply by inserting their genetic code into the genome of their host cell. When the cell divides, it makes a new copy of the virus’s genes along with its own DNA. Once it has installed itself in a genome, the virus can liberate itself from time to time, creating new copies. These copies can infect the same cell again, or wander out of the cell to infect another one. Some of these viruses, known as human endogenous retroviruses, may be harmless, while others have been associated with diseases such as cancer.

Continue reading “Pleistocene Medicine for Battling HIV” →

Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith launched an interesting discussion by talking about why her heart doesn’t automatically leap when a reporter wants to talk to her. That post was followed by a lot of scientists swearing up and down about the awful treatment they’ve experienced at the hands of reporters. Chris Mooney, a reporter, thinks the ranting is all misplaced, and wants us to understand that reporters who write about science are the best trained journalists of all.

Continue reading “Madam Speaker, I Yield My Remaining Time to the Paleontologist from the Great State of California” →

Today I jump sections at the New York Times. In the Week In Review, I take a look at the news of a bowhead whale that carried a harpoon tip for 115 years. It’s a cool discovery, but 115 years is actually not extraordinarily long for a bowhead whale–or a rockeye rockfish. Both those animals can live over 200 years. In today’s essay, I reflect on the evolution of old age (as well as the evolution of fleetingly short life spans). If you want to head for some scientific sources, check out the web site of Linda Partridge, a leading thinker on the evolution of aging at University College London. She’s got lots of pdf’s posted there, such as this 2006 review of the new field of “evo-gero”–evolutionary gerontology. And if you want to know just how long a tree frog can live (22 years!), check out the AnAge Database.

Continue reading “Old Whales and Young Gobies: Some Thoughts on the Evolution of Aging” →