Archive: Dec 2011

Dr. Elizabeth Barron holds a joint appointment as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and in the Program on Science, Technology & Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.…

When we think of biodiversity management, or maintaining the species diversity in an area, it’s easy to draw parallels to conservation. However, conservation usually focuses on one or few species at a time. This means that it often doesn’t mesh well with…

Adapted from image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center The World is Full of Bacteria There are over a billion microbes in just one liter of ocean water [1]. The same goes for a liter of soil. As the human population reaches 7 billion individuals…

Over 250 million years ago, cataclysmic volcanic activity wiped out nearly all life on earth. 65 million years ago, a meteor impact in the Yucatán drove the dinosaurs to extinction. In the past 540 million years of earth’s history, paleontologists have…

A worker fire ant is steadily traversing the landscape looking for a good meal to take back to the nest. Suddenly, it finds a lizard basking in the sun lying directly in its path. Undaunted, the ant goes back to the nearest foraging trail and recruits…

“An inordinate fondness for beetles” is what the celebrated biologist J.B.S. Haldane apocryphally quipped when asked his opinion of God. purchasing levitra Beetles comprise just under a third of the 1.2 million species described so far [], and a recent…

-- In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began tracking the prevalence of obesity in the United States. Since then, a clear trend has emerged: obesity is on the rise... If you’re wondering why the CDC is tracking obesity, it’s because those…

-- When Steve Jobs died on October 5th of this year, global attention turned to his cause of death – pancreatic cancer. Many people had questions: Would his fate have been different if he hadn’t elected for alternative treatments in the early days of his…