Our culture wars make for strange ironies. The fight over the cervical cancer vaccine is a case in point.

Yesterday news broke that a vaccine for cervical cancer might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Cervical cancer is caused by a virus known as human papillomavirus. It infects epithelial cells in the skin and other surface layers of the body, including the vagina and throat. On rare occasion it causes its host cells to start replicating madly, creating growths that sometimes progress into full-blown tumors. It’s a major menace: the American Cancer Society estimates that it causes 17 percent of all cancer cases–more than 1.8 million a year.

Continue reading “Texas, Where The Living Is Contradictory” →

There was a time when the publication of the entire sequence of a genome–any genome–was exciting news. I don’t have any particular passion about Haemophilus influenzae, a microbe that can cause the flu various infections. But in 1997 it was the first species to have its genome sequenced. It became immensely fascinating, simply because we could now, for the first time, scan all of its genes. Now the global genome factory is cranking away so quickly–with over five hundred sequences published and over two thousand in the pipeline–that a new genome is not necessarily news. There has to be something striking, biologically speaking, for it to light up the radar.

Continue reading “Did Grandma Have A Pouch? (And Other Thoughts on the Opossum’s Genome)” →

A bit of journalistic irony. Last week I groused that a new paper on methane from plants was getting very little attention in the press, despite the fact that it refutes a 2006 paper published in Nature that got lots of press. I wished aloud that the situation would be set right. Well, five days later, a few more sites have published the press release, but I’ve only seen one new piece of original reporting.

It appears in the news section of today’s issue of Nature. Hats off to Nature for making room for some uncomfortable news.

Continue reading “Methane News: Not Quite So Missing” →

When you find yourself, as I did a few days ago, spending a morning watching the absurdly long phalluses of ducks being coaxed from their nether regions, you can find yourself wondering how your life ended up this way. Fortunately, there is a higher goal to such weirdness. The phalluses of ducks are just the tip of an evolutionary iceberg. The female ducks have their own kinkiness, too. It’s all part of a fierce avian battle of the sexes.

For the latest, see my article in tomorrow’s New York Times. The paper on which it is based appears in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Continue reading “Kinkiness, Thy Name Is Duck” →