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Will Jimmy Carter exterminate Guinea worm soon? It’s not a race, exactly, but there’s an intriguing uncertainty about whether a former U.S. president or a software magnate will cause the next deliberate extinction of a species in the wild. Will Jimmy Carter eradicate Guinea worm before Bill Gates eradicates polio? It is more than a third of […]

Dung beetles, monarch butterflies and the role of cryptochrome My latest Mind and Matter column is on the esoteric topic of insect navigation: A friend who once studied courtship in dung beetles alerted me last week to a discovery. On moonless nights, African scarab beetles, which roll balls of dung, can use the Milky Way […]

Napoleon Chagnon was right about war in small-scale societies Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   A war within anthropology over the causes of war itself seems to be reaching resolution. The great ethnographer of the gardener-hunter Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela, Napoleon Chagnon, has long been battling colleagues over […]

The heritability of having many friends My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   Not only is the capacity for forming large social networks in monkeys partly genetic, but some of the genes that affect this ability may now be known. So suggests a new study of an isolated population of […]

Changing one letter in the genetic code at a precise location now possible Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rockefeller and Harvard universities have found a new method of editing DNA with great precision. This and another new technique mean that scientists can now go into a cell, find a particular sequence in […]

A conversion over GM food Well done, Mark Lynas, for changing his mind over genetically modified food. Here’s Mark Lynas on those who still oppose GM food: “I look forward to their opening up an honest and self-critical debate on this, rather than attacking others like myself who challenge green orthodoxy where it likely harms society […]

Satellites confirm that green vegetation is increasing My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the greening of the planet:   Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three […]

We are copying the Ming empire I have an op-ed in the Times on how even a global optimist can foresee absolute as well as relative decline for Europe if it continues to emulate the Ming Empire: A “rational optimist” like me thinks the world will go on getting better for most people at a […]

Electrochemical echoes of life’s membranes at alkaline vents What better subject for the origin of a new year than the origin of life itself? A new paper claims to have nailed down at last the conditions, location and path by which life started, slicing through two Gordian knots. Knot No. 1 is the chick-and-egg problem […]

New data on aerosols and ocean heat suggest slow, mild warming I published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the subject of climate sensitivity. Here are: 1. The article 2. An essay by Nic Lewis expanding on many of the points in the article. 3. My response to one of the critiques of […]