By itself, the migratory locust is about as harmless as a grasshopper. But under the right conditions, it can assemble with billions of its comrades into apocalyptic swarms that destroy thousands of hectares of crops in Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Now, scientists have discovered that a gut parasite may be key to keeping […]
Continue reading →Neurotransmitters are highly important and mind-bendingly complex. That’s why now and then I hip-check writers who boil neurotransmitters down to simple stories. Neurotransmitters are multi-purpose messengers. They’re versatile enough, in fact, to get hijacked by parasitic worms who use them to enslave perfectly innocent shrimplike creatures called gammarids. As Carl Zimmer relates, in Parasites Use […]
Continue reading →Earlier this week, WBUR’s Here and Now ran a taped interview with me about “Beautiful Brains,” my recent National Geographic article on teen brain and behavior. (You can listen to the interview here.) It’s only six minutes long, but nicely edited to highlight, from a high-altitude evolutionary point of view, what distinguishes adolescence, when we peak […]
Continue reading →I thought I’d heard enough about Tiger Moms, but perked up when I came across Tiger Moms and Orchid Kids, by Sam Gridley. Gridley considers how presumably harsh Tiger Mom parenting might generate success and happiness even in highly sensitive kids, the kind you’d think such treatment would crush. What kind of parenting are we talking […]
Continue reading →The reclamation of the “depression gene” proceeds apace: In a paper titled “Looking on the Bright Side of Serotonin Transporter Gene Variation,” two researchers who helped establish the “depression risk-gene” view of depression assert quite strongly that people with the gene variant in question — the s-allele of the serotonin transporter gene, HTTLPR — possess […]
Continue reading →This isn’t something we’ll figure out in a couple workshops; it’s something the industry and the broader genomics community will need to consider carefully over the next few years, even as it rapidly grows.
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