First Cell

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, October 31, 1995

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Part of the definition of life, says David Deamer, is that it is in a place.  Deamer is not uttering a koan in a Zen monastery. He’s sitting next to a microscope in a biology laboratory at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Deamer is a hard-core biophysicist, but still there is a monkish quality to him.  It comes not just from his unnervingly gentle manner of speaking but from his entire approach to science. This is a man who, in contemplating the pattern of nucleotides in DNA–represented by the letters A, C, G, and T–was reminded of musical notation. By allowing the letters to stand for notes instead of nucleotides–and using E as the equivalent of T–he turned human DNA into hypnotic melodies, available now for your meditative pleasure on both tape and CD.

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Hypersea Invasion

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, October 1, 1995

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The more you think about life on land, the less sense it makes. Life started in the ocean about 4 billion years ago, and for 3.5 billion years, it remained there. Evolution created organisms that had to stay wet- -they were essentially fluid-filled bags, and if they dried out, their circulatory systems would collapse, and most of their proteins and DNA would crumple up into uselessness. Without the ocean’s nutrient-filled currents, they would starve, and they and their fragile eggs and larvae would be immobile, unable to reach new or better habitats.

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The Descent of Birds

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, October 1, 1995

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Paleontologists have been arguing about where birds come from for more than a century. Most of them think birds are descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs, but even that is in dispute. And now a lively controversy has arisen about what happened to birds in the 145 million years after Archaeopteryx, the earliest incontestable bird, appeared. Were most birds wiped out 65 million years ago, along with the dinosaurs themselves, by the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous Period–such that living birds are descended primarily from a small group of shorebirds that managed to survive the catastrophe?

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The Processing Plant

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, September 1, 1995

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Not all ecologists spend their days in the presence of nature’s majesty, contemplating redwood groves or mountain lakes or rain forest canopies. Since 1988, Stephen Heard has been peering into a gruesome little roadside attraction called the purple pitcher plant. This bog dweller is actually quite charming to look at–it has a nodding brick-red bell of a flower and purple-veined leaves that curve in on themselves to form scalloped pitchers–but what Heard is interested in are the plant’s feeding habits. The Venus flytrap screams, ‘I’m eating insects!’ says Heard, a Canadian ecologist now at the University of Iowa. The pitcher plant does not.

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The Sharebots

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, September 1, 1995

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No man is an island, and Maja Matari´c thinks no robot should be, either. Matari´c, a Brandeis University computer scientist, believes robots will do their best work only when they begin to work together. How do you get a herd of robots to do something without killing each other? she asks. According to Matari´c, you have to put them in societies and let them learn from one another, just as seagulls and baboons and people do. Matari´c has already made an impressive start at teaching robots social skills. She has gotten 14 robots to cooperate at once–the biggest gaggle of machines ever to socialize.

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