For the August issue of Men’s Journal, I volunteered as an early guinea pig for a genome scanning service offered by the California-based company Navigenics. My genetic proclivity towards any of a couple dozen diseases was less than depressing but mildly alarming — and perhaps also completely unreliable. Here’s a .pdf of the story.
Navigenics and another genetic testing company, 23andMe, both just obtained their official licenses to operate in California.
Posted at 12:44 pm | Comment | Filed under Men's Journal, Recent stories, Science |
In the latest May issue of Outside, I have a feature-length profile of Garrett Lisi, a physicist who came up with a potential unifying theory of physics while living in a van on Maui. (The piece is out on newsstands but not yet online.) The very bare bones of his theory, which he first published last November, involve fitting together the four forces of physics — the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity — into an incredibly intricate shape called E8. Lisi was a challenging guy to capture, mostly because the ideas behind his theory are largely unintelligible to the almost anyone who (like me) lacks some — if not extensive — higher-level study of physics. It was clear as soon as I started delving into it that the stories hyping Lisi as “the next Einstein,” or what have you, were doing so with only the flimsiest of notions of whether he is, or even could be, right.
Interestingly, Lisi himself pretty much seemed to feel the same way. He was ambitious in his aims but modest about his chances of succeeding. As he told me — and several extremely accomplished academic physicists agreed — his theory had at best maybe a 5% chance of being at least partly right. So I ended up trying to play around with this notion of “the next Einstein” (as you can see in the cover line) and use it to focus in on what I found most fascinating about Lisi: that despite his ambitions, he refuses to compromise his lifestyle.
It was also interesting to see the divide among physicists when Lisi started showing up in the media last fall. On the one hand, the surprisingly caustic world of physics blogs made quite a show over having to waste precious time debunking such a crank. On the other, I talked to quite a few physicists (including a Nobel Prize winner) who said some version of, “hey, he’s probably not right, but he’s got some good ideas and does proper math, so who cares if he gets a bit too much press? New ideas are always for the good.” Which struck me — at least as an outsider to the community — as a healthier approach. In any case, no physicist who had actually bothered to talk to Lisi actually thought he even remotely approached being a crank. In fact, they all seemed to kind of admire his outsider approach. He certainly wouldn’t be the first physicist to make contributions working outside of academia.
Posted at 11:47 am | 2 Comments | Filed under Outside, Recent stories, Science |
I made a rare foray into daily news over the weekend, with a story posted at Wired online about the discovery of a dinosaur “mummy.” (In quotes as it’s a naturally preserved dino, not mummified in the sense of ancient Egypt; so don’t get excited you old-earth creationist folks.) The short piece was actually many months in the making, although it might not look it. I found out about the discovery from National Geographic Television over the summer but have had to keep it under my hat since then.
Back in June, I flew down to Boeing’s research office, in the hills outside of Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, to observe the dinosaur heading into the company’s giant CT scanner. It didn’t go exactly as planned. The researchers, led by Phil Manning from the University of Manchester, had trucked the body from South Dakota, only to discover that they’d built a frame around it too wide to spin on the CT bed. As a result, most of the day was spent hacking and sawing away at the corners of the dino’s plaster, trying to shrink it enough to fit. Post continued…
Posted at 12:37 pm | 2 Comments | Filed under Recent stories, Science |
A little late posting this, but I made a pair of appearances on National Public Radio recently, both times discussing the ins and outs of cellulosic ethanol based on my Wired piece. Both shows are archived for your listening pleasure:
First off, “Talk of the Nation Science Friday,” on October 5.
Followed by “Fair Game,” November 15.
Posted at 6:25 pm | Comment | Filed under Environment/Energy, Media appearances, Recent stories, Science, Wired |
My latest feature for Wired, about the science of cellulosic ethanol, begins its run on newsstands this week. The full story is also online, here. That’s a stalk of switchgrass adorning the cover, but the cellulosic ethanol described in the story actually involves making fuel from a wide variety of different plants—e.g. poplar trees, wood chips, other grasses. (Call it editorial discretion, but illustrating the cover line “THESE PLANTS ARE THE FUTURE OF ENERGY” might have cluttered things.)
The current method of producing ethanol (in the U.S.), from corn kernels, has been much castigated in the news lately. Although it seems a lot of the ethanol backlash is only tenuously based on actual research (especially when it comes to the energy balance of what goes into corn ethanol versus what you get out), there’s little doubt that corn ethanol has serious problems, enough to at least call its massive subsidies into question.
There is, however, another way of making ethanol, using a biological or chemical process to extract the cellulose, or “structural” part, from plants (rather than the starch, as in the case of corn ethanol, or the sugar, as in the case of the sugarcane ethanol in Brazil). Cellulosic ethanol usually makes the last couple paragraphs of ethanol stories; it’s declared to be some indeterminate number of years off, a biofuel holy grail awaiting a scientific breakthrough. There is general agreement that if we could make it, cellulosic fuel avoids most if not all of the problems of corn ethanol. Meanwhile, our federal energy targets (which are closer to hopes than targets, really) essentially assume that hundreds of millions of gallons cellulosic ethanol will soon be arriving. So, what gives? Post continued…
Posted at 3:43 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories, Science, Technology, Wired |
In Science this week, MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa and colleagues describe their recent research illuminating the biological mechanisms behind the sensation of déjà vu. (The journal paper is locked up, but there’s a good Scientific American account of the research.) The authors conclude that a set of neurons located in the hippocampus — specifically in an area called the dentate gyrus — fire to create a blueprint of a particular location. When that neural circuit is triggered incorrectly, set off perhaps by similarity between elements of a new location and one we have been to, we experience the sensation of déjà vu. Tonegawa used a clever mouse model to provide evidence for the hypothesis (from the MIT description):
In experiments with mice genetically engineered to lack a certain gene in the dentate gyrus, Tonegawa and colleagues pinpointed the signaling pathway underlying the recall of specific places.
Different sets of mice were placed in two similar chambers, one of which gave them a mild foot shock. After three days, the mice began to freeze in fear in both chambers, even the one in which they had never been harmed.
Within two weeks, the normal mice learned to associate only one chamber with the foot shocks while recognizing the second as safe. The genetically engineered mice “had a significant but transient deficit in their ability to distinguish similar contexts,” McHugh said.
The theory fits well with the Chris Moulin’s research at the University of Leeds, which I wrote about in the New York Times Magazine last year. The neurons Tonegawa identified in the hippocampus mirror the “recollective experience circuit” that Moulin and his colleagues hypothesized as the source of déjà vécu, a condition of persistent déjà vu: Post continued…
Posted at 6:42 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Deja vu, New York Times, Science |
Nathan Wolfe, the subject of my recent Wired profile, has a new paper out in Nature this week — co-authored with Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel — outlining some of the ideas from the story in greater scientific depth. The abstract is here. Some further coverage at MSNBC here.
Wolfe and Diamond, along with Claire Dunavan at UCLA, lay out a five-step process by which viruses jump from animals to humans and then become established in human populations. They also comb the scientific literature for 25 significant viruses, from hepatitis B to influenza A, to AIDS, to smallpox, and parse out some interesting conclusions about how some deadly viruses become endemic in humans, and others don’t.
Their main conclusion, however, is that we know very little about the origins of diseases that have shaped human history. They propose an “origins initiative” to study the beginnings of a dozen of the deadliest agents. They also describe Wolfe’s effort, described in depth in the Wired piece, to expland his bushmeat hunter-monitoring project in Cameroon into a global early monitoring system for new viruses jumping from wild animals to humans:
Most major human infectious diseases have animal origins, and we continue to be bombarded by novel animal pathogens. Yet there is no ongoing systematic global effort to monitor for pathogens emerging from animals to humans. Such an effort could help us to describe the diversity of microbial agents to which our species is exposed; to characterize animal pathogens that might threaten us in the future; and perhaps to detect and control a local human emergence before it has a chance to spread globally.
Posted at 12:05 pm | Comment | Filed under Science, Wired |
My latest piece for Wired, about UCLA biologist Nathan Wolfe’s efforts to detect and study viruses as they cross over from wild animals to humans in remote corners of the world, is out in the May issue. It’s on newsstands now, and also available online here.
Some additional photos from my reporting trip to Cameroon are currently online at Wired, and I’ll be posting more here later today.
Also coming: Some additional material that didn’t make the story cut. In the meantime, comments welcome or drop me an email at eratliff[at]atavistic.org.
UPDATE: I’ve put some more photos up. Captions up coming shortly.
Posted at 10:02 am | 3 Comments | Filed under Environment/Energy, Photography, Recent stories, Science, Wired |
