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Why influenza keeps failing to live up to pessimistic forecasts My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on infleunza:   Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this […]

A speculative idea that we could be the history of life’s second chapter My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on life in space: A provocative calculation by two biologists suggests that life might have arrived on Earth fully formed—at least in microbe form. Alexei Sharov of the National Institute […]

Two fierce arguments about DNA My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on junk DNA and on the messed up genome of the HeLa cell. The usually placid world of molecular biology has been riven with two fierce disputes recently. Although apparently separate, the two conflagrations are converging. The first […]

Under some conditions co-operation evolves My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   A new study by Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues has modeled the emergence of “nice” behavior in idealized human beings. It’s done by computer, using the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” game, in which a prisoner […]

The collapse of the Akkadian empire laid bare by isotopes My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Obsidian was once one of humankind’s most sought-after materials, the “rich man’s flint” of the stone-age world. This black volcanic glass fragments into lethally sharp, tough blades that, even after the invention of bronze, […]

De-extinction is much closer than it was My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the prospect of de-extinction, especially the passenger pigeon. Extinct species are gone forever. Or are they? For some time now the dream of re-creating something like a mammoth from its DNA has been floating about […]

How North America got its plants and animals back My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about what happened to the cology of North America after the asteroid impact of 66 million years ago:   Last week, just as a meteorite exploded over Russia, I used this space for an email […]

The Chicxulub impact and the dinosaur extinction coincided My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal, published the day after a big asteroid missed the earth by 17,000 miles and a smaller one blew out windows in Russia, is about the huge one that extinguished the dinosaurs just over 66 million years […]

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 […]