A hundred years from now, historians will look back and see the 20th century as the time when scientists discovered that the human self is a biochemical machine.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
Drosophila melanogaster • Photo by Hannah Davis (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Fruit fly joins the quest to unveil secrets of life
Drosophila melanogaster, the “black-bellied dew lover,” better known as the fruit fly, has joined the list of creatures whose DNA has been sequenced. It is the second multicelled animal to achieve this distinction, with the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
Photo by Juan Aguirre Saravia on Unsplash
Bahamas on front line for sea-level changes
One can be forgiven for being nervous about global warming if virtually your entire country lies only a few feet above sea level. As ocean water warms, it expands, and sea level rises. Also, a warming climate melts continental ice, further increasing the volume of the sea.
A late-summer Monarch prior to migration • Photo © Tom Raymo
Accepting the holy as something natural
Last week I described a visit to the Chincua monarch butterfly sanctuary in the mountains of central Mexico. Each winter, tens of millions of monarchs from all over eastern North America congregate at Chincua, and a few other patches of nearby forest, to hibernate, feed, and breed.
Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash
Flutter of monarchs inspires gushy prose
Getting here wasn’t easy: A six-hour drive from Mexico City over sometimes terrifying mountain roads, with an overnight stay along the way in Zitácuaro; a mile-long climb by foot along a rugged trail deep in volcanic dust to 10,500 feet, then a drop into a canyon forested with fir trees.
Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash
Science fits nicely between art, reality
“There’s nothing creative about science,” someone recently said to me. “The world’s out there and science tries to know it. Scientists create nothing; they merely describe.”
Photo by Firanka Mipinska on Unsplash
The missing amphibians: Mystery or telltale sign?
There was wind in the willows as the Water Rat and the Mole rowed their boat along the river. They were on their way to visit Toad of Toad Hall.
A statue honoring Giordano Bruno in the present day Campo de' Fiori • Photo by Fred Romero (CC BY 2.0)
Bruno would urge us to open our eyes
Giordano Bruno was born in the Kingdom of Naples in 1548, only a few years after the death of Copernicus. At the age of 24 he was ordained a Dominican priest, although his curious and uninhibited mind had already attracted the disapproval of his teachers.
Love vine at work • Photo by Forest & Kim Starr (CC BY 3.0)
Bahamian love vines cling and you can’t let them go
OK, so it’s Valentine’s Week. I’ve just spent a week pulling love vine out of the garden and I’m not feeling very romantic.
Detail from “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo (c. 1512)
An appropriate mix of art, science
In early December [1999], the science journal Nature reported the sequencing of the first human chromosome — a complete transcription of the chemical units (nucleotides) making up the chromosomal DNA.