Tag: evolutionary biologist
Why Do Animals Play? – The Atlantic
Orcas sank another yacht near the Iberian Peninsula in November. Members of a pod had been ramming and shaking boats in the area for more than three years, and had now sunk four. Many observers believed the orcas were attacking their boats, perhaps taking revenge on fishermen. But both boaters and scientists wondered if the orcas were playing, and the marine biologists who study this group think it may be a fad. “The consensus is that they’re doing this
The Most Mysterious Cells in Our Bodies Don’t Belong to Us
Some 24 years ago, Diana Bianchi peered into a microscope at a piece of human thyroid and saw something that instantly gave her goosebumps. The sample had come from a woman who was chromosomally XX. But through the lens, Bianchi saw the unmistakable glimmer of Y chromosomes—dozens and dozens of them. “Clearly,” Bianchi told me, “part of her thyroid was entirely male.”
The reason, Bianchi suspected, was pregnancy. Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had
Milk Is an Evolutionary Marvel
If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.
The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it. They can describe, mostly, who makes it: mammals (though arguably also some other animals that feed their young secretions
‘Supergenes’ Bend the Rules of Evolution
This article was originally published by Quanta Magazine.
Thousands of miles from home in the steamy Amazon rainforest in the mid-1800s, the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates had a problem. More than one, really: There were thumb-size biting insects, the ever-present threat of malaria, venomous snakes, and mold and mildew that threatened to overtake his precious specimens before they could be shipped back to England. But the nagging scientific problem that bothered him involved butterflies.
Bates had noticed that some
Humans Can’t Quit a Basic Myth About Dog Breeds
After four decades of training and studying dogs, Marjie Alonso has lost track of the number of pets she’s seen because their humans felt they weren’t acting as they “should.” There were the golden retrievers who weren’t “friendly” or “good enough with kids,” and the German shepherds who were more timid scaredy-cats than vigilant guard dogs. There was the Newfoundland (who later turned out not to be a Newfoundland) who had been adopted to fulfill a Peter Pan–esque fantasy
The Danger of Delta Holds to 3 Simple Rules
Fifteen months after the novel coronavirus shut down much of the world, the pandemic is still raging. Few experts guessed that by this point, the world would have not one vaccine but many, with 3 billion doses already delivered. At the same time, the coronavirus has evolved into super-transmissible variants that spread more easily. The clash between these variables will define the coming months and seasons. Here, then, are three simple principles to understand how they interact. Each has caveats
Why a Variant’s Deadliness Is So Hard to Define
The coronavirus is on a serious self-improvement kick. Since infiltrating the human population, SARS-CoV-2 has splintered into hundreds of lineages, with some seeding new, fast-spreading variants. A more infectious version first overtook the OG coronavirus last spring, before giving way to the ultra-transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7) variant. Now Delta (B.1.617.2), potentially the most contagious contender to date, is poised to usurp the global throne.
Alphabetically, chronologically, the virus is getting better and better at its primary objective: infecting us. And