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9bd1a3f
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Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.
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science
pointless-harm
self-harm
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Carl Zimmer |
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ef19fd4
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Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.
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Carl Zimmer |
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3b320c6
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Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted the alga, casting away its nucleus and its mitochondria, keeping only the chloroplast. That thief of a thief was the ancestor or Plasmodium and Toxoplasma. And this Russian-doll sequence of events explains why you can cure malaria with an antib..
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Carl Zimmer |
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3553db6
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The very word virus began as a contradiction. We inherited the word from the Roman Empire, where it meant, at once, the venom of a snake or the semen of a man. Creation and destruction in one word.
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Carl Zimmer |
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ba1c5f0
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The extra clutter adds no important insight; instead, it offers more clutter in which erros can lurk.
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Carl Zimmer |
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3e6e138
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Dolphins may even be able to name each other with signature whistles. But their society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean.
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Carl Zimmer |
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bc3508b
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From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, ho..
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parasites
vaccines
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carl zimmer |
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b563124
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parasites make up the majority of species on Earth. According to one estimate, parasites may outnumber free-living species four to one. In other words, the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology. The book in your
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Carl Zimmer |
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0b8ae0e
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Intelligence is far from blood types. While test scores are unquestionably heritable, their heritability is not 100 percent. It sits instead somewhere near the middle of the range of possibilities. While identical twins often end up with similar test scores, sometimes they don't. If you get average scores on intelligence tests, it's entirely possible your children may turn out to be geniuses. And if you're a genius, you should be smart enou..
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Carl Zimmer |
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823265c
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Based on the number of viruses she found in her samples, Proctor estimated that every liter of seawater contained up to one hundred billion viruses.
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Carl Zimmer |
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19537c3
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I am a single, useless snail-loathing datum.
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Carl Zimmer |
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bc63b29
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In 2009, for example, a team of scientists at MIT succeded in implanting a wireless electrode into a zebra fish. With the press of a button, the scientists could wirelessly transmit a signal to the song-producing region of the bird's brain. The bird instantly stopped singing.
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Carl Zimmer |
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f24dca2
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It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host
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Carl Zimmer |
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3003434
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The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.
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history-of-mankind
history-of-the-united-states
sociology
psychology
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Carl Zimmer |
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9139558
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When we see faces, we don't just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.
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Carl Zimmer |
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14011d9
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They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents' genes.
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Carl Zimmer |
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9a4d43f
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At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly, but they have provided the world with some of its most important innovations. Creation and destruction join together once more.
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Carl Zimmer |
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9176ec9
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To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. "How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself," writes Michael Alkire, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, in the new Encyclopedia of Consciousness."
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Carl Zimmer |
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406468b
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And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example. Amazingly, the "Halle Berry" neuron responded to any picture of her, including one in which she was dressed as the masked Catwoman. Even the name Halle Berry triggered that neuron, which was silent at the sight of other actresses or their names."
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Carl Zimmer |
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81d6353
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He might breed them for years before reaching the proper form. After a few years of breeding a type of lily, Burbank found a single specimen that met his standards. A rabbit ate it.
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Carl Zimmer |
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3df2a4d
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It may be hard to imagine a world before antibiotics, but now we must imagine a world where antibiotics are not the only weapon we use against bacteria. And now, ninety years after Herelle first encountered bacteriophages, these viruses may finally be ready to become a part of modern medicine.
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Carl Zimmer |
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ea91128
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Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close to zero.
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Carl Zimmer |
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721c136
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Poverty may be powerful enough to swamp the influence of variants in our DNA.
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Carl Zimmer |
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18d8139
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Reviewing the records of two million recruits, Feyrer and his colleagues also checked the natural iodine levels in their hometowns. Nationwide, the researchers found, the introduction of iodine raised the average IQ by an estimated 3.5 points. And in the parts of the country where natural iodine levels were lowest, Feyrer and his colleagues estimated that scores leaped 15 points. It may be hard to believe that such a straightforward change ..
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Carl Zimmer |
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b61f72f
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The problem is not that dolphins are dumber than we thought, but that our anthropomorphism inevitably makes it hard to understand an intelligence other than our own.
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Carl Zimmer |
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dec6b5a
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Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.
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Carl Zimmer |
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7cd3ab7
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Human rhinoviruses may help train our immune systems not to overreact to minor triggers, instead directing their assaults to real threats. Perhaps we should not think of colds as ancient enemies but as wise old tutors.
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Carl Zimmer |
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f8915fe
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What is striking about them is that the father-leaning disorders tend to produce autistic symptoms. The mother-leaning disorders tend to produce schizophrenic ones.
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Carl Zimmer |
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1eef09e
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They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.
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Carl Zimmer |
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f43df0f
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Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons that responded to touching their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey's hand. Other neurons in the brain respond to things that appear to lie within arm's reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change--reacting to object..
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Carl Zimmer |
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3ddeb70
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When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.
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Carl Zimmer |
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2e6925b
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tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.
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Carl Zimmer |
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c8e31dc
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Humanity, in other words, was not some genetically uniform stock that could be purged of a few defectives. Penrose saw our species as rich with genetic diversity, and forever falling short of genetic perfection. To eliminate imperfection would demand eliminating humanity itself.
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Carl Zimmer |
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edb6fda
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Gravettian men stood on average six feet tall. When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature. Men lost eight inches of height. The drop was likely the result of Europeans switching to a grain-rich diet much lower in protein.
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Carl Zimmer |
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83d3a12
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In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood just five foot five.
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Carl Zimmer |
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2de603d
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For comparison, tap out a single grain of salt from a shaker. You could line up about ten skin cells along one side of it. You could line up about a hundred bacteria. Compared to viruses, however, bacteria are giants. You could line up a thousand viruses alongside that same grain of salt.
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science
microbiology
wonders-of-nature
virus
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Carl Zimmer |
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97d96da
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There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed.
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Carl Zimmer |
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631c9e9
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They made a compelling case that height could serve as an economic barometer, recording the well-being of societies.
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Carl Zimmer |
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28105f7
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Today, Latvian women have become the tallest women in the world, jumping from about five foot one to five foot seven. Dutch men rose from five foot seven in 1860 to just over six feet tall, making them the tallest men on Earth.
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Carl Zimmer |
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b23d559
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In fact, Galton believed England's future well-being depended on a national breeding program to produce more talented humans.
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Carl Zimmer |
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9f06ee7
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He imagined this program as a joyous ritual, bringing gifted young people together to have better and better children.
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Carl Zimmer |
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17a3cab
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Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties," Galton predicted."
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Carl Zimmer |
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2149558
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We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken.
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Carl Zimmer |
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6c5b05f
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Based on estimates of the somatic mutation rate, some researchers have estimated that there might be over ten quadrillion new mutations scattered in each of us.
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Carl Zimmer |