Recognizing leprosy in wild chimpanzees
A story in Science has been making the rounds on my feeds about a newly-recognized problem in chimpanzee populations: “Leprosy, ancient scourge of humans, fo...
A story in Science has been making the rounds on my feeds about a newly-recognized problem in chimpanzee populations: “Leprosy, ancient scourge of humans, fo...
Jennifer Frazer writes on the Scientific American blog site: “The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer’s Grows”.
Notable paper: Rajabli F, Feliciano BE, Celis K, Hamilton-Nelson KL, Whitehead PL, Adams LD, et al. (2018) Ancestral origin of ApoE ε4 Alzheimer disease ris...
This, from ScienceAlert:
A news story by Michael Price in Science: “Sleeping sickness hides in human skin”.
Carl Zimmer reports on some of the work being done to understand the extreme die-offs of saiga antelopes in Central Asia: “More Than Half of Entire Species o...
Notable paper: Kay, G. L. et al. (2015) Eighteenth-century genomes show that mixed infections were common at time of peak tuberculosis in Europe. Nat. Commun...
Did Homo erectus get herpes from chimps?
Ed Yong, writing for the new Wellcome Trust-sponsored science publication, Mosaic, has gone to Thailand to follow the development of artemisin-resistant mala...
My University of Wisconsin-Madison colleague Tony Goldberg has a new paper doing some innovative ecological genetics: “UW scientist sniffs out possible new t...
John Timmer’s reporting on the rise and fall of the hypothesis that XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome is the best I’ve seen so far on the topic: “How a Co...
Re: Schizophrenia
Robin Ann Smith contributed a guest post to Scientific American, titled “The worms within”. The main idea is that the immune system evolved to deal with para...
Ewen Callaway describes work probing the biology of a chimpanzee endogenous retrovirus: “Ancient chimp virus ‘brought back to life’”
Donald McNeil, Jr.::
Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week’s story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: “A finding on malaria comes fro...
Malaria in humans is caused by one of five different species of Plasmodium parasites. The deadliest of these is P. falciparum, especially within Africa where...
An interesting study has shown how people in the samurai class of Edo period Japan were poisoning their children with lead. The results are reported in a cur...
A new book by Sonia Shah covers the history of malaria and the way it affects people today around the world: The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 5...
While I was out of town, Wired ran a long article about Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his quest to find the genetic causes of Parkinson’s disease. There i...
Science has a news article that details the conflict over publishing new research on a viral cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS): “Conflicting Papers on ...
A new paper claims that HIV infection may be impeded in individuals who had the smallpox vaccine:
Many of us use sickle cell as an example in classes. I always do so while noting the progress that has been made in treating the condition in Westernized con...
The NYT reports that Nigeria has been free of guinea worm infections for a year.
Where did leprosy come from as a human pathogen, and how did it spread through the world? Two years ago, this new research would have merited a whole book. N...
Will the swine flu lead to the next big evolutionary change for humans? No. But it has already begun to affect the way people interact with each other. I wan...
A new strain of HIV has come from gorillas: “New Strain of H.I.V. Is Discovered”
Jenny Tung of Duke University and colleagues report in Nature (online early) that yellow baboons have evolved a Duffy antigen-related defense against a baboo...
Rachael Rettner reports on a hypothesis that human cancer risk may be a side-effect of brain evolution. The hypothesis emerges from studies of gene expressio...
I have had a New York Review of Books essay by Richard Lewontin, titled, “Why Darwin?” on my desktop for a week without getting to the last section of it.
Natalie Angier’s article, “Bone, a masterpiece of elastic strength,” is pretty cool. It describes the case of Harry Eastlack, a sufferer from fibrodysplasia ...
Dienekes points me to a paper with a straightforward title: “Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females”.
Well, when you’ve got a captive audience….
Roni Caryn Rabin reports on a study linking blood glucose spikes to age-related memory decline:
Claims that the rapid depopulation of the Americas around 1500 AD, leading to abandonment of cleared lands and reforestation, may have intensified the Little...
Jennifer Viegas writes an interesting story about a new study that shows the extinction of Christmas Island rats was driven by black rat diseases:
I know many readers are fans of Terry Pratchett, as I am. He has a long, heartfelt article about his experiences with PCA, a type of early-onset Alzheimer’s....
Earlier this week, the Washington Post printed a nice David Brown story about endogenous retroviruses and evolution.
The immune system’s long memory:
Hebrew University has issued a press release about ongoing research on human and animal bones from the Jericho excavations. They’re looking for signs of tube...
The keywords to the article include, “carnivorous marsupial” and “precocious breeding.” What better teaser could you possibly hope for?
Last week, the NY Times printed an interesting article by Andrew Pollack, titled "Redefining disease, genes and all." The article explores recent (and ongoi...
I very much liked Carl Zimmer's Slate piece about foodborne pathogens and their lessons for defending against bioterrorism. Zimmer has a book about E. coli ...
A new paper in Current Biology documents the mortality suffered by Taï Forest chimpanzees as a result of common human respiratory ailments during the l...
I read two interesting articles today on brain performance-enhancing of one kind or another. Denise Grady of the New York Times contributes a long article a...
Viral evolution is different from human evolution chiefly because viruses mutate faster, exist in larger populations, have much shorter generations, and hav...
A nice essay by Dr. Barron H. Lerner in the New York Times looks at a long-time survivor of sickle cell anemia, and the ways that treatment options have dev...
In a paper in press in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Randal Bollinger and colleagues suggest that the human vermiform appendix functions as a "safe ho...
A new whole-genome association study has found more genetic variants protective against HIV. The course of HIV infection is variable, even in the absence of...
I couldn't help but wonder after reading this story:
Another reason to avoid inbreeding:
Alfred Crosby gives a short quote from chapter 19 of Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and I found it interesting enough to look for the full context. Voya...
Here's an interesting abstract from a 2005 review paper by Ann Gardner and Richard Boles:
Nick Wade has an article about progress toward a treatment for Rett syndrome, a form of autism that almost exclusively affects females.
Nature has a little article this week by Fran Van Heuverswyn et al. announcing that SIV (the primate relative of HIV) has been found in wild populations of ...
This story caught my attention:
I'll be lecturing on hemoglobinopathies again this week, and I stumbled across this 2001 article by Malcolm Gladwell, profiling Fred Soper and the early 20t...
Thanks to an enterprising student, I have an AP story about the discovery of a risk allele for prostate cancer that has different frequencies in different g...
There is a nice short review by Giovanni Manfredi in the current Nature Genetics on mtDNA damage and Parkinson's. The paper is really a perspective accompan...
The NIH is reporting on the role of connexin 26 in psoriasis and eczema (via Science Blog):
This week's Nature had a news feature by Nick Lane about mitochondrial disease. I found it interesting because it focuses not only on disorders associated w...
A new paper in PLoS Biology by Xiaoxia Wang and colleagues finds that a gene called CASPASE12 (OMIM) has been under recent selection in humans. The twist is...
On the subject of malaria defenses, I also ran across this review article from last year by Dominic Kwiatkowski.
I'm linking to this 1994 review article by Ernest Beutler (straight to PDF) because (a) it has over 400 references that pretty much cover every bit of G6PD ...
This paragraph from Ayala and Coluzzi (2005) gives an admirable synopsis of the causes for the evolution of falciparum malaria-bearing mosquito Anopheles ga...
On the subject of why the PrP gene is evolving in humans, it is worth pointing to this new paper:
Scientific American has an editors' blog, SciAm Observations. I point to it because a series of recent posts has included an interesting exchange among evol...
A new paper in PLoS Biology examines the recent evolution and dispersal of the Δ32 allele at the CCR5 locus (via Gene Expression). The introduction has...
Martin and colleagues (2005) have a PNAS paper examining the coevolution of falciparum malaria (Plasmodium falciparum) with early humans.