Must Sex Lead to Death? Never heard of the dasykaluta? The phascogale? Don’t be surprised. Small marsupials rarely get favorable media attention. Look at how we treat mice. But these otherwise insubstantial, arthropod ingesting (that includes roaches) rodents deserve our interest and perhaps our piteous respect. For they show the lengths evolution can go to […]
Deep Living (9/16/13)
Deep Life How slow can life go? How deep? At what point does biology become geology? Dig down and you will find some answers. If you go to the bottom of the ocean, first drill and drill and drill until you reach a further 2.5 kilometers. Smack through rock that has lain there 100 million […]
Wild Type Humans Like Moving (9/5/13)
Walk on the Wild Side You have been part of a great biological experiment. You did not sign up for it. Yet it has changed the way you walk, the way you sleep, how you talk and socialize. Pretty much everything you do, in fact. In laboratories scientists make a major distinction between species born […]
Little Bit by Little Bit (7/31/13)
Gradually… How do people get healthy? One little bit by little bit at a time. So it seems to work with exercise. Gretchen Reynolds did a nice short review in the July 9th, New York Times on studies of short versus “long” exercise. One group studied – young men from Beijing. Monitors looked at changes […]
Going FAR to Prevent Diabetes (7/8/13)
Moving and Eating Walk after meals. Stand and move after you eat. You’ve probably heard this advice somewhere. But does it really work? If the goal is preventing diabetes, it seems to prove true – at least for a group of folks studied at George Washington University. The Study People 60 and over at risk […]