Feeling the burn: receptors, heat, and the mysteries of spicy food
My most memorable experience with excessive spiciness was sometime in my early teens. My family took me to a Cleveland Cavaliers game, and I got a helping of nachos with cheese and jalapenos. For some reason, I decided to eat the whole cup of jalapenos in one gulp. I didn’t watch much basketball after that.…
Organism that Lives Less Than 1 Day Predicts the Seasons
Measuring daylight to predict the future It’s late winter in an alpine meadow. For the past few months, the local plants have been waiting out the cold weather, mostly not growing. Usually, this would continue for a while longer because spring doesn’t come for another month or two at this altitude. But this year an…
Power naps on the wing: how great frigatebirds spend weeks at sea without ever landing
Sleep is nearly universal in animals, being found in species as different as jellyfish, fruit flies and whales. Though much about why we sleep remains mysterious, this ubiquity suggests it’s doing something important, a conclusion further supported by the observation that bad things happen when animals, including humans, miss too much of it. Yet as…
What Evolutionary Biology Says About the Future of AI
As artificial intelligence advances, experts have warned about its potential to cause human extinction. Exactly how this might come about is a matter of speculation. However, it’s not hard to see that intelligent robots that are able to build more of themselves, improve on their own design, and pursue their own interests would be a threat to humanity.…
Evolution and aging: do the dinosaurs have anything to do with human senescence?
Aging is a fact of life. Any human old enough to pay attention to people around them is familiar with this reality. But it is most salient to those of us over 40. We can list things that have changed since our youth: less flexibility, slower reactions, slower healing, and various things sagging. But the single most…
The diet of our ancestors: what tapeworms tell us about human evolution
Most of us don’t think about tapeworms much. They’re uncommon in the developed world, and kind of gross. But it turns out the little freeloaders have something to tell us about human evolution. It has to do with when they started infecting humans. Before we go into that, let’s talk about how these parasites make a living. There…
What Can We Learn From A Sleeping Octopus?
In recent years, an accumulation of research has made very clear how important getting enough sleep is for human health. There’s a wider biological corollary to this — sleep seems to be pretty much universal in animals. For all its importance though, it’s still not 100% clear what sleep is actually for. In vertebrates like humans, the mystery is compounded…
Adventures in metabolism: If your cat eats antifreeze, you can ask your vet to get him drunk
The main ingredient in antifreeze is a compound called ethylene glycol (also found in various other products). This stuff is really bad to drink, both for humans and animals. My friend and colleague Joe Wirth is a cat owner and also a scientist. Recently his cat Bjorn came back smelling like antifreeze. “It was so…
Youth and the Pleistocene Climate
At the recent UN climate meetings, youth activists once again figured prominently. Over the last few years, public discussion of climate change has benefited enormously from their passion and sense of urgency. It’s understandable that young people feel so strongly — after all its their future that’s on the line. But this is actually not the…
Things Not Seen: Reflections on Life and Science in the Pandemic
In the first summer of the pandemic, I was only able to take my kids to the beach the week before school. While the older two rode boogie boards, my younger daughter dug holes near the waterline, afraid of the waves farther out. I kept her company there, making footprints in the sand around her.…
A Closer Look at the late-2020 Resurgence of Covid-19 in Manaus, Brazil
What sequence analysis and computation reveal about the deadly spread of the virus
Time in Lake Turkana
The region around Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya is a desert landscape. To a Californian, the look of the hills and rocks and washes is familiar even if the vegetation is not. Bumping along in a land cruiser, we must have crossed a half-dozen dry river beds. Their size made it clear that at least…
Roosting with bats (not a good idea)
A few months before the pandemic my family stayed at a hotel on Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The place was run by an expatriate European and had an extremely tolerant attitude toward small animals. Mostly I think this reflected a desire not to be bothered about things. There were various creepy crawlies on the…
Eliot Bush 