Friday's Elk, October 9, 2016

Thanks to Dana Ehret for taking pictures of my talk Thursday at the University of Alabama. Before speaking about human-driven evolution, I had an excellent day talking with UA biologists about turtles and death cap mushrooms and other glories of Alabama's biodiversity.

  Does the Human Lifespan Have a Limit?
Aging is one of those science-journalism topics that never gets old. (Sorry.) Over the years, I've written a number of pieces on what happens when we get old, and why we get old in the first place. You can read some of them here here here and here. Also, you can watch this Science Happens video or this lecture I gave at Stony Brook on the evolution of aging (I wrote it up here.)

On Wednesday, a provocative new study on aging came out. Researchers looked at the demography of aging over the past century and came to the conclusion that we have hit a biological limit. I report on the study this week in the New York Times.
  Creating A Portrait of the Human Gene Pool
At Stat, I've written a feature about a new way at looking at genomes: as a map-like graph. The genome graph may let scientists understand genomes at a deeper level, and understand the interconnections between millions of genomes at once. You can read it here.


  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
  The End
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Best wishes, Carl