Appearances have enormous importance, Mr. Kessler. The creation and maintenance of appearances. Appearances govern.
Sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych
Disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.
The basic point is so important I’ll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.
Influenza is caused by three types of viruses, of which the most worrisome and widespread is influenza A. Viruses of that type all share certain genetic traits: a single-stranded RNA genome, which is...
The good news about Reston virus, derived both from the 1989 US scare and from retrospective research on Luzon, is that it doesn’t seem to cause illness in humans, only in monkeys. The bad news is tha...
For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More pat...
Two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These
Problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines develop...
The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.
Molecular phylogenetics.
Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthrou...
بعد أسبوع من موت آني ابنة داروين بينماالصورة لا تزال حاضرة في الذاكرة، كتب داروين مذكرة خاصة قصيرة تسجل القليل من مفاتنها، وعاداتها، وسماتها، ورقصاتها حوله بطول الممشى الرملي، وتدقيقها صعب الإرضاء، و...
The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years pa...
Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial.
A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.
Know that walking into a small woodlot, he wrote, is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.
Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his Rosetta Stone paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.
This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great l...
Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts.