Wired: Wired Science
Under Pressure
My latest article for Wired is now online. It’s about baboons, stress vaccines and the often dangerous effects of glucocorticoids. One of the subplots of the article is the severe health consequences of the social hierarchy, which I mostly discuss in the context of the Whitehall Studies:
Genome Surprise: Guinea Pigs Have Ebola!
The ebola virus is one of the nastiest pathogens known to man. It corrodes blood vessels and stops clotting, leaving most of its human victims bleeding to death through their pores. And guinea pigs — along with opossums, wallabies and insect-eating bats — have it in their genes.
A genomic hunt for virus genes traced sequences to Ebola and the closely related Marburg virus in no fewer than six vertebrate species. Echoes of the less-gruesome borna virus family appeared in 13 species, including humans. The genes appear to have been mixed in about 40 million years ago, and have stuck around ever since.
Controlling Soot Might Quickly Reverse a Century of Global Warming
A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change.
Compared to the larger, longer term task of getting greenhouse gas pollution under control, limiting soot wouldn’t be hard. Unlike new energy technology and profound changes in lifestyle, the tools — exhaust filters, clean-burning stoves — already exist.
Photoshop of Horrors: Wired Readers Show BP How It’s Done
Warming of Oceans Will Reduce and Rearrange Marine Life
The warmth of the ocean is the critical factor that determines how much productivity and biodiversity there is in the ocean, and where.
In two separate studies, researchers found that warming oceans have led to a massive decline in the amount of plant life in the ocean over the last century, and that temperature is tightly linked to global patterns of marine biodiversity.
Dark Dust Trails Form When Whirlwinds Suck Sand Grains Clean
The ephemeral dark trails left in desert sand by dust devils are produced when the whirlwinds blow tiny particles of lighter-colored silt and dust off larger sand grains, a new study shows. Even removing a layer of dust and silt only a few micrometers thick can produce a dark trail visible with satellites, recent field studies suggest.
Marsupial DNA Redraws Family Tree
The kangaroo’s twisted marsupial family tree is now in order thanks to — you guessed it — jumping genes. Genetic evidence shows that a South American ancestor gave rise to all Australian marsupials, and that the South American opossums were the earliest group to branch off from the other six marsupial clans.
Birth Control Messes With Monkey Business
The powerful hormones in birth control drugs change how lemurs smell, radically altering the subtle chemical cues that guide their attraction and communication.
Research on a two-foot-tall primate shouldn’t be extrapolated directly to humans, but the findings resonate with studies in people, which have come largely from behavioral observations and are just beginning to quantify the chemistry.
“I’m not telling people not to take birth control. But what we found in lemurs needs to be studied in humans,” said Christine Drea, a Duke University reproductive biologist.
My First Act of Free Will
The British philosopher Galen Strawson doesn’t think much of free will. His argument is fairly straightforward. It goes something like this:
1) I do what I do because of the way I am. If I want to eat Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, or listen to Blonde on Blonde, it’s because I prefer, at this moment, the taste of that cereal and the sound of that album.
2) If I’m going to be responsible for my choices, then I also have to be responsible for the way I am.
3) But I’m not responsible for the way I am! At some point, my wants and needs – the stew of factors behind my preferences – are beyond my control. They’ve been programmed by natural selection and embedded in my genes; they’ve been influenced by my parents, and shaped by my siblings and peers and all those commercials on television.
Two Is the Magic Quantum Number
Extending an experiment at the foundation of quantum physics confirms that two is company and three is a crowd. In a new twist on the famous double-slit experiment, researchers have verified a basic tenet of quantum mechanics by showing that adding a third slit doesn’t create additional interference between packets of light.
