Blogs / The Loom

I wrote about the two sides of our brains in April for Discover. Now some of the scientists whose research I highlighted have an article of their own in Scientific American, focusing on the ancient evolutionary origins of specializations in each hemisphere. So if you still have interhemispheric cravings, check it out!

Mind wandering is the subject of my new column for Discover. Far from just useless mental static, mind-wandering actually creates a distinctive pattern of activity in our brains–a pattern that suggests that it may actually be playing a crucial role in our mental life. Check it out.

Here’s a vision of how science may work in the future.

Last month I scrambled to write a story about the evolution of swine flu for the New York Times. I talked to some of the top experts on the evolution of viruses who were, at that very moment, analyzing the genetic material in samples of the virus isolated around the world. One scientist, whom I reached at home, said, “Sure, I’ve got a little time. I’m just making some coffee while my computer crunches some swine flu. What’s up?”

All of the scientists were completely open with me. They didn’t wave me off because they had to wait until their results were published in a big journal. In fact, they were open with the whole world, posting all their results in real-time on a wiki. So everyone who wanted to peruse their analysis could see how it developed as more data emerged and as they used different methods to analyze it.

Now, a little over a month later, they’re publishing their results in the journal Nature. Normally we press folks would get a press release about the paper a week before publication, and it would be under strict embargo till it appeared in the journal. This morning, however, I got a press release pointing me to the published paper. And while Nature normally requires you to subscribe to read a paper, the flu paper is published under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can get it and use it under the license’s terms.

While that’s all very exciting, the paper itself is an anxiety-triggering read. The new swine flu (which the authors now call S-IOV S-OIV) is only distantly related to other known swine flus, which means that there are a lot of flu viruses circulating around about which we know very little. And, as I mentioned in my article, it had already entered the human population several months before it came to light earlier this spring. Be sure to check out figure 1 (I’m inserting it below from the wiki–thanks, Creative Commons!), which shows how lots of bird, swine, and human season flu viruses mixed together to produce the new beast. The authors warn that the pattern of evolution they see is the sort of pattern the big flu pandemics followed when they emerged in the past.

With this sort of urgent situation at hand, the patient process of old-fashioned science publishing may have to be upgraded.

[Image: CDC]

Yesterday, I wrote about how snakes use their scales to help them crawl without legs. But what if you don’t have bones–what if you’re just a single cell? I’ve always been fascinated by how cells crawl about, like minuscule versions of The Blob. I recently had an excellent time talking to some of the scientists who are figure out what goes on inside cells when they go from point A to point B. And that’s the subject of my article in today’s New York Times. Be sure to check out the video and graphics that go along with it. It’s alive!

[Image: Wikipedia]

“We do not even in the least know the final cause of sexuality; why new beings should be produced by the union of the two sexual elements…The whole subject is as yet hidden in darkness.”

So wrote Charles Darwin in 1862. In this week’s issue of Science, I write an essay on what we know now about this mystery. The essay is here (subscription required), and you can listen to me talking about why sex is weirder than you know on this week’s Science Podcast.

To continue this celebration of sex in all its evolutionary glory, I’ll be guest-blogging a few times this month over at Science’s Origins blog. I’ll let you know here when each post goes up.

Image: From Robert F. on Flickr/Creative Commons Licence

Readers of the Loom may be familiar with the work of Bryan Fry, who studies the evolution of snake venom. (See these two previous posts on his work.) I’ve got an article in tomorrow’s New York Times about his latest paper, to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, Fry and a big team of collaborators argue that Komodo dragons, the biggest lizards on Earth, are venomous. (There wasn’t room in the story to describe their argument that an extinct relative of Komodos that measured 21 feet long, was venomous too.) Provocative stuff, to be sure, and certainly not universally embraced by other researchers. I got some highly spicy quotes from critics. Check it out.

(PS: When the paper is put online this week, you’ll be able find it here: http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.0810883106 )

[Image from Wikipedia]

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. In 1969, the book also became fodder for one of the oddest ideas in neuroscience: the grandmother cell. What if a neuron in your head only responded to the sight of your grandmother? For a long time, many neuroscientists have dismissed it out of hand. And yet the idea will not quite die.

Earlier this year a psychologist published an intriguing review of the grandmother cell, arguing that we should not be so hasty to run its obituary. Other scientists I’ve spoken to don’t think grandmother cells actually exist, but their own ideas about how we recognize individuals are equally fascinating. I’ve put together what I’ve learned about Philip Roth’s unexpected contribution to neuroscience in my latest Brain column for Discover. You can read it here.

Should I take it as a compliment that somebody took the time to hack my online archive of articles? It’s still pretty irritating. Whatever the twisted motivations of the hacker, my web guardians and I are now figuring out how to repair the mess. My apologies to anyone seeking an article.

You have to hand it to those little flu viruses–with just a few genes apiece, they can infect us humans by the millions, and we can barely keep up with their evolution. In tomorrow’s New York Times, I’ve written a natural history of the flu, looking at how influenza viruses mutate, swap genes, undergo natural selection, cross species barriers, and  adapt to new hosts. The new strain of swine flu (or perhaps more precisely, the new strain of human-and-bird-flu-viruses-swirled-up-inside-pigs-and-then-mixed-with-other-pig-viruses-that-descend-from-human-and-bird-flus-as-well) is just the latest chapter in this baroque evolutionary tale.

Two years ago I learned about an idea for saving species from climate-triggered extinction: move them some place nice. Here’s a piece about the concept that I wrote at the time for the New York Times. Over the past two years, more evidence of climate-induced changes to diversity has accrued. And now some scientists have actually moved some animals to test the possibility that assisted migration could help. But the idea has also now triggered some intense opposition from critics who call it a game of ecological roulette.

I’ve revisited assisted migration (now known as managed relocation) for a new piece for Yale Environment 360. Check it out.

My new Discover column about the brain has just been posted. I take a look at that most obvious–and most puzzling–thing about a brain: its two sides. Check your left-brain/right-brain cliches at the door and check it out.

For its first four weeks, a human embryo looks like a crumpled tube. But around its twenty-seventh day of development, four buds bulge from its sides. Over the next few days, the buds grow like tulips, stretching out into flattened stalks and blooming into crowns of fingers and toes. Inside these developing limbs, bones condense. Muscle cells, tendons, blood vessels and nerves all find their respective places. The embryo now has hands with thumbs to suck, legs ready to deliver a kick.

That’s the opening to my latest piece for the New York Times, “From Developing Limbs, Insights That May Explain Much Else.” No meta-commentary on the death of the press. No jousting with the forces of ignorance. Just straight, cool science.

(Some of the papers behind the story: 1, 2, 3, 4)

[Image of limb bud with apical ectodermal ridge marked by arrows: Maria A. Ros]