This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history.
I have a weakness common to many bloggers–I like to check my site meter to see who’s coming to my blog, and from where. Often I wind up discovering intriguing sites run by people whose interests run along the same lines as mine, such as evolutionary biology. Today, however I was surprised to see a lot of traffic coming from Answers in Genesis, a creationist web site.
The New York Times, April 12, 2005
The 18th-century Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani found that a spark could make a frog’s leg kick. His experiments established that electricity was the hidden force nerves used to control the body. Now researchers at Yale have done Galvani one better. They can make fruit flies walk, leap or fly by shining a laser at the insects, setting off certain neurons inside them.
It’s possible, at least in theory, that this method could someday be developed into a sort of animal remote control. But its biggest promise is as a scientific tool that may shed light on the function of different kinds of neurons. The ability to switch on particular neurons may allow scientists to discover clues about a range of disorders, from Parkinson’s disease to drug addiction.
Continue reading “An Off-and-On Switch for Controlling Animals?”
I’ve been catching up on my online reading, and a couple days ago John Hawks offered this tantalizing hint that Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbitmay be a pathological specimen. Such claims have been made before based on the small skull of the hominid, but they’ve been pretty powerfully rebutted. But Hawks is claiming that the rest of the skeleton is sickly. He seems to be basing this contention on having seen the bones, and on research by others that will be coming out soon. Now, normally I wouldn’t put much stock in this sort of off-hand remark, but Hawks has been so good on his blogthat I have to say I’m intrigued. Adding to my interest is the fact that he now retracts his suggestion that the Hobbit represented a very early migration out of Africa by australopithecines.
I’ve got an article in tomorrow’s New York Times about a startling new way to control the nervous system of animals. Scientists at Yale have genetically engineered flies with neurons that grow light-sensitive triggers. Shine a UV laser at the flies, and the neurons switch on. In one experiment, the scientists were able to make decapitated flies leap into the air by triggering escape-response neurons. In another, they put the trigger in dopamine-producing neurons, and the flash sent healthy flies walking madly around their dish. (You can read the paper for free at Cell‘s web site.)