The First National Inventory of All Household Life (on a swab)
In dust one can record the actions of storms, the wearing of mountains, the consequences of industrialization. The study of dust has a long history. [...]
The Value of Art to Science—A story of rotting bodies, belly buttons and the music of symbiosis
In The Man Who Touched His Own Heart I tell the story of the artist Leonardo da Vinci’s discoveries inside bodies. Among the most astonishing of [...]
How Islamic Scholars Saved Knowledge (and Science)
My grandfather was concerned with a relatively small number of things in the last years of his life; one of those things was the dark [...]
Ecological Medicine: Can intestinal worms cure us of our modern pandemics?
Hundreds of self-experiments, tens of thousands of worms In 1976, Jonathan Turton, a British parasitologist was suffering from allergies. Most of the time scientists suffer [...]
Help us Solve The Mystery of the Danish Underpants
Recently, Pernille Hjort from the Danish Museum of Natural History visited us in Raleigh to exchange ideas about new projects in public science. It was an [...]
On Joining the Lab (Boat)
Some people go from early life to death focused on one mystery. This approach, I am told, can be very satisfying. One of my mentors, [...]
The Bear
I was staying in a one, room shack beside a river. The river, a majestic river, reminded me of the sound of a washing machine. My [...]
Could there be 200 million species on Earth?
Recently, one of my colleagues, Brian Brown, found thirty new species of flies in urban Los Angeles. Species not yet named. Species not yet studied. [...]
Chimps and Humans are Less Similar than We Thought
Mary Claire King, as much as any individual scholar, has changed how we think about what it means to be human. She did so using [...]
The Magic Seeds of UCONN EEB
The amazing thing about trees is that they start as seeds. Some small enough for ants to carry. Others that ride in the guts of [...]
The Single Best Predictor of How Many Heartbeats You Will Experience
The single easiest way to increase the number of heartbeats you can expect to experience in your life is to move. Geography is a far better [...]
Life at the Margins
Some discoveries and innovations come from big labs funded incredibly well by governments in affluent countries. They come from those in the mainstream, freighters plowing [...]
The Truth About What Makes Us Human (and Writing Books)
New analyses of chimpanzees and humans reveal them to be far more different than suspected, perhaps as much as 95% different. Sometimes it takes time [...]
A Whole New Way of Doing Citizen Science, Maybe
Some parts of science are boring. Some are tedious. Some seem as though they will never end. It is these parts of science we tend [...]
The Most Important Map You Will Ever See
and other stories of the biogeography of pathogens Among the greatest of the unwinnable debates among academics is the place of humans in nature. It [...]