First, some trivia...

For reasons that aren't very interesting, I recently had to compile a complete list of all my publications. Turns out, in the 10 years that I've been doing this, I have written 2329 pieces and 1 book. Actually, as of this week, 2336 pieces... 

How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America

“When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,” says Richard McKay, a medical historian at the University of Cambridge, who recently tracked down the details of the case. By the time the CDC study was published in 1984, Patient O had become Patient 0. In the paper’s sole diagram, Dugas sits at the center, like the spider in a web of disease. Labels have power. As “Patient Zero,” with its connotations of ground zero, Dugas came across as not just the center of that particular AIDS cluster, but as the source of the entire U.S. epidemic." (Image: NIAID) 
 

The Answer to Zika May Be More Mosquitos

"The mosquito Aedes aegypti is infamous for carrying Zika and dengue fever. The quest to kill it has consumed enormous amounts of money, time, and effort. So it seems counterintuitive that a team of scientists and health workers have just received $18 million to release these mosquitoes over densely populated parts of Brazil and Colombia. Their insects are no ordinary mosquitoes, though. They’ve been implanted with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which stops them from spreading the viruses behind Zika, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, and other diseases. It's not totally clear how it does this, but it may be by competing with the viruses for nutrients or boosting the insects' immune system. With this microbe inside them, the mosquitoes are no longer carriers of sickness. They are dead-ends." (Image: Pilar Olivares) 
 

The Bug That Stalks Spiders on Their Own Webs

"Spiders don’t make for easy prey. They are almost all venomous and almost all predatory. Many build webs whose silken lines ensure a sticky end for blundering insects. And those webs are, in a very real way, extensions of the spiders: By carrying the telltale vibrations of intruders, they act as both burglar alarm and death trap. So it’s a bold kind of insect that hunts spiders for a living, a positively foolhardy one that hunts them on their own webs, and a seemingly suicidal one that does so on foot. And yet, that’s exactly what the giraffe-necked assassin bug does." (Image: Fernando Soley) 
 

Memory Lane Has a Three-Way Fork

"In his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust wrote that “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” That elegant line speaks to a simple truth: There are things you remember, and there are things you remember well. Even if you can recall a past event, your memories will vary considerably in how much detail they contain, and how correct those details are. In an elegant experiment, a team of neuroscientists led by Jon Simons at the University of Cambridge have shown that these aspects of our memories—our success at recalling them, their precision, and their vividness—depend on three different parts of the brain." (Image: Reuters) 
 

Why Do These Plants Have Metallic Blue Leaves?

"Roses are red but violets aren’t blue. They’re mostly violet. The peacock begonia, however, is blue—and not just a boring matte shade, but a shiny metallic one. Its leaves are typically dark green in color, but if you look at them from the right angle, they take on a metallic blue sheen. “It’s like green silk, shot through with a deep royal blue,” says Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol. And she thinks she knows why." (Image: Matthew Whitney) 

These Birds Fly Almost a Year Without Landing

"Every July, young common swifts leave their European roosts and migrate to western and central Africa. They’ll only be back in the following June, and they’ll spend the intervening 10 months almost continuously in the air. They might travel to Africa, but their feet never meet African soil. “They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air,” says Susanne Åkesson from Lund University in Sweden. “They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground.” That's because their wings are too long and their legs are too short to take off from a flat surface." (Image: Alan Williams) 
 

More good reads

These Birds Fly Almost a Year Without Landing