NYTimes Science Times: Mammals that poison; Ta-DA pal, you’re circumicised; Hope diamond lab test; our dun-EE-suh-vin kinfolk…
Perhaps the story most interesting, yet puzzling from a journalistic point of view, in the Science Times today is, on the front page and below the fold, Canadian freelancer Alanna Mitchell‘s catch-up on news about prehistoric Homo sapien couplings with other Homo species – Neanderthal mainly, Denisovan too for sure, and maybe even the Hobbits of Flores. After ten paragraphs I was still sighing to myself that everything I’d read was just about what has already been widely reported including in the New York Times.Perhaps it is just that the reporter, who writes well-received books, likes to tell a story in a logical timeline fashion rather than start with the new stuff and then jitterbug around with the context needed to appreciate it. Standard news structure does tend to sap a tale of its narrative tension. Plus, to guide the reader through all what’s already gone on, before the good stuff (news), is not a promising tactic for getting a story past the NYT’s editors. It’s a puzzle. But worth the wrestle. One is well savvied up for details on how modern technology is helping to move the research beyond its first and already reported stages. The end has a real surprise, at least to me. Maybe the tiny admixtures of genes many modern peoples carry, delivered by lateral transfer from now-vanished species of the hominin kind, are crucial to our own remarkable success. Even our immune systems may be better. Maybe.
The top story is a Natalie Angier ode, starting with a little poem that sounds somewhat like Ogden Nash (or Dixon Lanier Merritt), and perhaps Angier wrote it. It’s about skunks, hedgehogs, deer, Capuchin monkeys, and other mammals that arm themselves with chemical poisons. Much of it is vaguely familiar, but she wisely starts with something few of us known anything about: The African crested rat. I never knew of this extravagant creature, rat though it be. Boy, put on a furry tail and body-length mohawk, and a rat is as cute as a chipmunk.
Other headlines of note:
- Kenneth Chang: For Scientists, Hope Diamond’s Blue May Offer Geology Lesson ;
- Ron Cowen – Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany ; Cowen is a bit of a bug on the history of audio recordings (see his recent article in Science on a historian of sound), and shows his stuff here.
- Claudia Dreifus (Q&A): “To become a biologist in the Soviet Union wasn’t simple … I had some fortunate encounters” ; Wonderful tale of scientific spirit.
- Donald G. McNeil Jr: AIDS Prevention Inspires Ways to Make Circumcisions Easier ; Sometimes near painless too.
As usual, lots more. Whole Section.
- Charlie Petit
January 31st, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Actually, the immune system stuff isn’t new either. There was literally nothing new about ancient human admixtures in this piece. OTOH, for most readers, who are not as well-informed as you and I are, Charlie (ahem!), it was a decent enough summary of where things stand at the moment. When I read the piece I wondered if maybe it started out with a focus on how DNA technology is zipping along, very fast sequencing, the approach of the $1K genome, etc. and then changed focus, possibly at an editor’s behest, for the sake of human interest. Literal human interest.
February 1st, 2012 at 10:51 am
The early synapsid mammalian ancestors, a group which included pelycosaurs such as Dimetrodon, diverged from the amniote line that would lead to reptiles at the end of the Carboniferous period.