The Ed's Up #122
Clearing the Body's Retired Cells Slows Aging and Extends Life Throughout our lives, our cells accumulate damage in their DNA, which could potentially turn...
The Ed's Up #121
We're the Only Animals With Chins, and No One Knows Why "“Little pig, little pig, let me come in,” says the big, bad wolf. “No, no, not by the hair on my...
The Ed's Up #120
The Fairy Tales That Predate Christianity "Many of the Tales of Magic were similarly ancient, as the Grimms suggested. Beauty and the Beast and...
The Ed's Up #119
Inside the Eye My first feature story for National Geographic is up. It’s about the evolution of the eye, in all its unpredictable messiness and glorious...
The Ed's Up #118
Book news Delightfully, I Contain Multitudes gets a nod in the Guardian's literary calendar for 2016. My work The Incredible Thing We Do During Conversations...
The Ed's Up #117 - The 2015 Review Edition
Hi! As 2015 draws to a close, I'm spending it in the way I began it: tired, and racing to meet some arbitrary self-imposed deadline. Thanks, brain! It's been...
The Ed's Up #116
We Know Almost Nothing About the Animals That Live on Our Faces "The history of humanity’s grand sweep around the world is recorded in our genes and...
The Ed's Up #115
Meet the Necrobiome: The Waves of Microbes That Will Eat Your Corpse "A body falls in the woods. Quickly, a dedicated coterie of bacteria, fungi, and...
The Ed's Up #114
I've been at a conference on human gene-editing this week, so there are several stories in this newsletter about that. If you want to read only one, I'd...
The Ed's Up #113
Inside the Bizarre Genome of the World’s Toughest Animal "In the tun state, tardigrades don't need food or water. They can shrug off temperatures close to...
The Ed's Up #112
Health Experts Are Explaining Drug-Resistant Bacteria Poorly "Their understanding of antibiotic resistance is even worse. The researchers asked them about it...
The Ed's Up #111
How Salmon Switch on Infrared Vision When Swimming Upstream "In rivers, flecks of mud and algae shift the underwater light away from the clear blue of the...
The Ed's Up #110
Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells? "In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are...
The Ed's Up #107
Beefing With the World Health Organization's Cancer Warnings The WHO "classified the consumption of red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A),”...
The Ed's Up #106
A Scientist's Shocking Discovery About Electric Eels "Despite their intensity, these shocks are not blunt instruments. Kenneth Catania from Vanderbilt...
The Ed's Up #105
No, Scientists Have Not Found the ‘Gay Gene’ "So, ultimately, what we have is an underpowered fishing expedition that used inappropriate statistics and that...
The Ed's Up #104
How to Cure The Diseases That Nobel-Winning Drugs Cannot "In the 1970s, William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura discovered a class of drugs called avermectins...
The Ed's Up #103
Save the Parasites (Seriously) "In the 1980s, conservationists ushered the planet's 22 last remaining Californian condors into captivity. They saved the...
The Ed's Up #102
How Genome Sequencing Creates Communities Around Rare Disorders In 2013, I told the story of Lilly Grossman, a girl who discovered the genetic fault behind...
The Ed's Up #101
Why Don't We Know the Age of the New Ancient Human? "The simple answer is: Because dating fossils is really difficult. Scientific papers and news reports...