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Hiking Bass Canyon

March 2007

FROM THE ARCHIVE

CLIENT LIST

Archaeology

Arizona Highways

Audubon

Barnes & Noble Review

I write about science, health, and the environment.

A fluctuating reality

January 2007

Wednesday, July 29, 2010

A Meaty Issue (Momentum)

In the lead-up to climate talks at Copenhagen last year, an activist in a black-and-white cow costume held up a cardboard speech bubble with a single word: “Burp.” To those who know that methane produced by livestock is a greenhouse gas four times as potent as carbon dioxide, the message was clear. Go vegetarian, meat is killing the planet

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Brain-imaging programme suspended after violations (Nature)

The work of a leading brain-imaging centre has been suspended after an investigation found that researchers had injected impure psychiatric drugs into clinical-trial volunteers.

Also: Watching a gene at work

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Scientific American Lives: New Answers for Global Health

Inspiring Lives: Alejandro Cravioto

Developing lifesaving solutions, from Mexico to Bangladesh

Inspiring Lives: Zhu Chen

China’s barefoot minister of health

Inspiring Lives: Tore Godal

Norway’s leprosy doctor

Also ten innovations for global health from adaptive eyewear to the Jaipur foot

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Conservation Biology Meeting in Edmonton, Alberta

I was at the conservation biology meeting this year and filed a few stories for Nature and Scientific American:

Payments for conservation

Condor poisoning linked to lead in bullets

Biodiversity aid lags in corrupt countries

Thursday, July 22, 2010

The eating of the minds (The Atlantic)

Unfortunately, I cannot lay claim to this fluent discourse on the pleasures of the noggin. Due credit goes to my traveling partner, Dan Grushkin. I did, however, scribble down some notes as he chewed, and chewed some more. So far, it’s our only published piece from the Morocco trip.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Do mangrove forests save lives? (Nature Conservancy Magazine)

On the evening of October 28, 1999, an economist named Saudamini Das and her husband were glued to the television in their apartment in Delhi, India. A tropical storm had been meandering in the Indian Ocean for the previous week, but it had abruptly shifted course, according to weather reports. The storm strengthened to cyclone intensity as it moved over the tepid waters of the Bay of Bengal and began heading toward the couple’s birthplace in the state of Orissa, where Das’ mother and two brothers still lived.

By the time the super cyclone made landfall the next day, its winds were roaring at 155 miles per hour, the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. The tide surged to heights of 26 feet, drowning everything in its path. Some 275,000 homes would be destroyed, and an estimated 1.67 million people left without shelter. Orissa is one of India’s most isolated and impoverished states; at the time of the storm, the region’s coasts were connected to the outside by a handful of telephones, an aging telegraph and an unreliable mail service.

That night, all news ceased.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Cuba in Puerto Rico, Student strike, and more

I went to Puerto Rico last week for a couple stories for The Scientist. Along the way, I filed dispatches for TS and Smithsonian, where I am blogging this month.

Strike hurts Puerto Rico science

Cuba invited to U.S. conference

Mestizos and Medecinas: Race-based medicine in Latin America

Squawking duets of Puerto Rican parrots

Monday, May 10, 2010

Biomarkers for kidney damage should speed drug development(Nature)

Drug-makers have come up with a new set of tools to determine if a promising therapy might damage the kidneys.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Western Sahara and Morocco

Just back from a whirlwind tour of Morocco and the disputed territory of Western Sahara with fellow journalist Dan Grushkin. We’re trying to sell our stories about environmental issues, but in the meantime, you can watch this attempt at levity in a region dotted with military checkpoints.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Which illegal drug is best for the environment? (Slate/Washington Post)

Let's be frank: Most highs for you are kind of a downer for the planet. The conditions under which illegal drugs are produced make it impossible for the government to enforce any sort of clean manufacturing regulations, and the long-standing "War on Drugs" inflicts its own environmental damage. (Think of the RoundUp herbicide sprayed on 120,000 hectares of rural Colombia each year.) There are some ways to measure the eco-credentials of various narcotics, though. To understand how various drugs affect the environment, we need to take a close look at where each one comes from and compare the ways they're harvested or synthesized.

Also my unfortunate Green Lantern on gas stations appeared May 11, in the midst of the BP spill. And an update on June 29 made it into the Washington Post.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The big test for bisphenol A (Nature)

In her 25 years of research, Gail Prins, a reproductive physiologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago, had got used to doing science her way. But when her experiments started to question the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in thousands of consumer products from food-can linings to baby bottles, she found her work under a new level of scrutiny. The experience was unnerving, she says. "I feel I do solid science." Even federal evaluators in the United States agreed that her work was suitable for informing decisions about BPA's safety — at least at first.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Panel to take a broad view of bioethics (Nature)

US President Barack Obama last week announced the full membership of his bioethics advisory council, unveiling a more diverse body and one that is likely to have a greater impact on policy than its predecessor.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Bon voyage, caveman (Archaeology)

Curtis Runnels slipped a three-inch-long hunk of milky quartz into his pocket and figured it would make a great expedition paperweight. In 2008, the Boston University archaeologist had collected what he thought was an unworked stone just a few days into a survey for Mesolithic artifacts at the mouth of a gorge on the southern coast of Crete. But early the next day, as he sat on his patio and drank his coffee, the low sun hit the paperweight just right. "Suddenly, I could see the flake scars," he recalls. "This isn't even Mesolithic, this is much older."

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Counterfeiter (The Scientist)

On May 25, 2007, Kevin Xu logged into his Gmail account and found a startling message from a man who could have been his biggest client.

From an office suite on the 28th floor of the Plaza Royale in Beijing, the baby-faced businessman had gone from selling shark cartilage and penicillin to Chinese hospitals and clinics to cashing in on the high-profit margins of the European and—he hoped—US pharmaceutical markets. Xu kept a list of 29 brand-name drugs he could deliver at cut-rate prices, from the baldness remedy Propecia to lifesavers like the antileukemia drug Gleevec. If it wasn’t on the list, Xu boasted that he could find a way to get it.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Nature

I just finished a short-term gig writing for the journal Nature, here are a few of my favorite stories:

America overhauls chemical safety law

Lawsuit rekindles gene patent debate

NIH scrutinizes drug-company payments at Baylor

Fraud rocks protein community

Frogs secret disposal system revealed

Ovaries reveal their inner testes

Deep structure imaged under Hawaii

Friday, January 1, 2010

A Pioneer’s Perils (The Scientist)

On a rainy morning at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md., last fall, Duke University biochemist Homme Hellinga took the stage to sum up what he had been doing over the last 5 years with the $2.5 million Pioneer award he received in 2004. Unlike other NIH grants that require a strict game plan with concrete goals, the Pioneer award is a kind of no-strings-attached slush fund to encourage “high-risk, high-impact research.” Hellinga and his cohort had come to report on their findings and experiences.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Best Science & Nature Books 2009 (Barnes & Noble Review)

My personal picks include Denialism, Lost City of Z, and Ivory’s Ghosts

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

A Treaty on Ice (The New York Times)

A desolate island in a frozen sea brings the world’s nations together with a new type of agreement: one giving an international commission the right to govern a landmass through unanimous vote. The year was 1912; the subject was the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. Thereafter, it and the surrounding archipelago were to belong to no nation, its natural resources open to all.

That agreement was no doubt on the minds of the drafters of the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed to much fanfare 50 years ago Tuesday by 12 nations: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Polar Obsession (Barnes & Noble Review)

For National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, the dead penguin was proof that the leopard seal had a tender side. A man who has repeatedly placed his body at the mercy of sub-freezing waters and well-fanged predators, Nicklen sought to demonstrate that these half-ton mammals of the Antarctic are far less dangerous than they have been portrayed. Explorer Ernest Shackleton reported that they had attacked his men and his boat on multiple occasions; and in 2003, a starving seal clamped onto the leg of a British scientist, drowning her. But Nicklen spent four waterlogged days with a massive female who took him under her fin, protecting him and offering stunned, maimed, and half-eaten penguins for his consumption. He politely declined.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Pharma CPR (The Scientist)

Michael Bristow has been in biotech long enough to see more than a few promising drugs flounder in clinical trials, but he’s not ready to give up on bucindolol. Back in the 1990s, the University of Colorado cardiologist and molecular pharmacologist helped guide the Phase III Beta-Blocker Evaluation of Survival Trial (BEST) for the heart failure drug, which was first developed by Bristol Myers and then under license to Intercardia in North Carolina

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

How green are those veggies? (Slate/Washington Post)

I know you can buy local or buy organic, but I've heard that some crops are simply more resource-intensive than others, regardless of how or where they are grown. So what's the key to picking foods that have the smallest environmental footprint?

We've already been over the environmental benefits of choosing poultry over beef and anchovies over haddock. But you're right to suggest that the same sort of logic can apply to picking vegetarian foodstuffs. Certain crops require loads of phosphate fertilizer, for example, which is mined from the ground and can eventually cause stream-choking algal growth. Other fruits and veggies are grown with heavy doses of pesticides, fungicides, and other chemicals that can pollute waterways and cause reproductive problems in animals. So how do you know which crops are best to eat? Here's the Lantern's rule of thumb: Try to keep your more extravagant fruit cravings in check, but don't sweat the low-impact calories that come with your carbs.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Amazon? Still not out of the woods (Slate/Washington Post)

We used to hear so much about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but lately not a word. So what happened—did we save it or not?

We didn't save it, but we haven't stopped trying. Environmentalists fret over the fate of the Amazon for good reason: It contains more than half of the planet's remaining tropical rainforest, one-fifth of our global freshwater, and as much as one-third of the world's biodiversity. Saving all this was once a rallying cry for green activists, and a few early triumphs made that goal seem likely. But attention soon shifted away from the rainforest to issues like climate change and organic agriculture, and now the Amazon is disappearing at about the same rate it was in the 1980s.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Are proposition 65 warnings healthful or hurtful? (Los Angeles Times)

Whether you are pumping gas or buying a fillet of salmon, your eyes have no doubt landed on an ominous sign documenting the presence of "chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."

Such alarming notices began appearing in the state in 1986 thanks to Proposition 65, otherwise known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, which prohibits businesses from discharging potentially harmful chemicals in drinking water and requires them to disclose the presence of such chemicals on their premises. The 19-page list of hundreds of potentially dangerous chemicals kept by the state is updated annually.

Today, the warnings are everywhere: parking lots, hardware stores, hospitals and just about any decent-sized business including, as of May, those of medical marijuana suppliers -- because marijuana smoke is now on the list of known carcinogens.

Monday, November 2, 2009

In the muck (The Scientist)

Duckweed first appeared in satellite images of Venezuela in 2004 as a mysterious swirl of green on the surface of Lake Marcaibo, doubling in size with each passing day. Marcaibo is one of South America’s largest bodies of water, but with brackish water and few nutrients, it had never harbored this rapid-growing aquatic plant. Local scientists speculated that heavy rains washed sewage and nutrients into the lake along with duckweed colonies from neighboring ponds. By June, they estimated that the world’s smallest flowering plant covered 18 percent of the lake’s surface before it began receding.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Controversial couple dominates U.S. medical tourism (Reuters)

These are heady days for the medical tourism industry. With U.S. healthcare prices spiraling upward, more and more insurers and individuals are looking abroad for treatment. By some estimates, 650,000 Americans will check into foreign hospitals from Mexico to Thailand this year.

The boom has created rich opportunities for entrepreneurs catering to first-time medical travelers, start-up businesses and eager hospital managers in developing countries.

Enter lawyer couple Jonathan Edelheit and Renée-Marie Stephano.

Edelheit and Stephano, both 37, are the founders of the Medical Tourism Association (MTA), a non-profit association they created to further "quality of care, transparency, communication and education" in the industry. They are also the organizers of the industry's annual top conference, under way this week in Los Angeles.

In many ways, Edelheit and Stephano have become the face of medical tourism. That has caused admiration, envy and unhappiness in the tight-knit industry.

Monday, August 24, 2009

National Academy as National Enquirer? PNAS publishes theory that caterpillars originated from interspecies sex (Scientific American)

This story inspired a controversy, leading PNAS editors to initiate an investigation, hold the paper back from print publication for about a month, and publish it side by side with a rebuttal.

Caterpillars transform into butterflies and moths via a radical process known as metamorphosis, where their bodies virtually turn to soup and develop anew.

Since Darwin, biologists have believed that the larval and the adult forms of insects evolved from a common ancestor. Indeed, the evolution of metamorphosis is thought to have fueled the incredible diversity of insects today, allowing them to exploit different habitats at different life stages.

Now, a lone scientist claims that the phenomenon arose when two very different creatures accidentally mated.

Here is some of the follow-up coverage from other outlets:

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True Blog

Times Higher Education

Inside Higher Ed

Nature (Follow-up #1, Follow-up #2)

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Endangered in Africa (Slate)

Three dispatches from my recent trip to Africa:

Pimp My Ostrich

The ostrich chariot lies in the shade of a pepper tree here on the century-old Highgate Farm. . .

Those Doggone Conservationists

When we first spotted Fender through the 8-foot-tall perimeter fence, I could see she was hobbling behind her two pals, Rory and Stellar. . .

Watching Wildlife with White People

At about 5:30 in the morning, I was idling at a stoplight and squinting to read the tiny print on my map when the white chap next to me rolled down the window of his beige Land Rover. . .