What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.
Then there was a new epidemic—of fear, said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the...
The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.
The order Chiroptera (the hand-wing creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a b...
The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have deve...
Soon afterward, in August 2008, another team was dispatched to Uganda, this time including the veterinary microbiologist Tom Ksiazek, a veteran of field responses against zoonotic outbreaks,
She is one of this new breed of cross-trained disease specialists I’ve mentioned, veterinarian-ecologists who recognize the intimate connectedness of human health, wildlife health, livestock health, a...
RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they’re limited to small genomes. In fact, there’s a fancy name for that...
Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It’s caused by a paramyxovirus
Now here’s the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance o...
Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.
In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city—more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions—it might have escaped containment and burned through a
Horses aren’t native to Australia. They are exotic, first brought there by European settlers barely more than two centuries ago. Hendra is probably an old virus, according to the runic evidence of its...
He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were.
Among the most important things to remember about evolution—and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn’t have purposes. It only has res...
Molecular phylogenetics.
We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction
Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell’s equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of...
Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.