Archive (Page 3) • The Ed's Up • Buttondown

The Ed's Up #136

Every Episode of David Attenborough’s Life Series, Ranked This is probably the most fun I've ever had working on a project. To celebrate David Attenborough's...

The Ed's Up #135

Book update Here are the US versions of my book, out really soon on August 9th! A DNA Sequencer in Every Pocket "While one MinION is heading off-world,...

The Ed's Up #134

Why We Sleep Badly on Our First Night in a New Place "Other animals can straddle the boundaries between sleeping and wakefulness. Whales, dolphins, and many...

The Ed's Up #133

Book update I got the proofs of my book this week! It's amazing to see it as an actual physical object. This is a version of the UK cover (the real one will...

The Ed's Up #132

Coming to a screen near you (maybe) I'm delighted to announce that Tangled Bank Studios have optioned the rights to my upcoming book, I Contain Multitudes,...

The Ed's Up #131

The 8-Bit Game That Makes Statistics Addictive "Before I started playing Guess the Correlation, I didn’t expect to spend an hour of my Easter weekend...

The Ed's Up #130

The Mysterious Thing About a Marvelous New Synthetic Cell "Why bother? Because they ultimately want to intelligently design new life-forms from scratch—say,...

The Ed's Up #129

Solving the Mystery of the Tully Monster "It turns out to be a close relative of modern lampreys—those nightmarish, blood-sucking fish that are essentially...

The Ed's Up #128

Corruption Corrupts "Corruption deprives citizens of more than money. It’s also tied to a shortfall in honesty. In a new study, Simon Gächter and Jonathan...

The Ed's Up #127

The Most Promising Cancer Therapy in Decades Is About to Get Better "The rise of immunotherapy has been one of the most startling and promising developments...

The Ed's Up #126

February 25, 2016

Eagle-eyed subscribers might note that there was no Ed's Up #124, and that I skipped straight from 123 to 125. This may seem like an arithmetical error on my...

The Ed's Up #125

February 17, 2016

XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers "Over the last three years, Sarah Eddy and Daniel Grunspan have asked over 1,700 biology...

The Ed's Up #123

February 11, 2016

Natural History Museums Are Teeming With Undiscovered Species "These discoveries strike me as being deeply sad, in a way that digging up prehistoric fossils...

The Ed's Up #122

February 4, 2016

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

January 28, 2016

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

January 21, 2016

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

January 14, 2016

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

January 7, 2016

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

December 28, 2015

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

December 16, 2015

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

December 9, 2015

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

December 3, 2015

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

November 27, 2015

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

November 19, 2015

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

November 12, 2015

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

November 5, 2015

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

October 29, 2015

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

October 22, 2015

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

October 15, 2015

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

October 8, 2015

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

October 1, 2015

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

September 23, 2015

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

September 17, 2015

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...

The Ed's Up #100

September 10, 2015

6 Tiny Cavers, 15 Odd Skeletons, and 1 Amazing New Species of Ancient Human "That 18-cm gap was all that separated them from the bones of a new species of...

The Ed's Up #99

September 3, 2015

The $1 Pocket Microscope "It took about six months for the jungle to kill Aaron Pomerantz’s microscope. Thanks to the sweltering humidity, water started...

The Ed's Up #98

August 26, 2015

How Reliable Are Psychology Studies? My first piece in my new job at The Atlantic! No one is entirely clear on how Brian Nosek pulled it off, including Nosek...

The Ed's Up #97

August 12, 2015

Hi, I wrote a book! This Monday, I submitted the complete draft of my book I Contain Multitudes, about the fascinating partnerships between animals and...

The Ed's Up #96

This Frog Uses Its Spiky Face to Deliver a Venomous Headbutt When Carlos Jared was first ‘stung’ by the venomous face of the Greening’s frog, he didn’t...

The Ed's Up #95

Why Do Glowing Sharks Glow? "There are about 550 species of shark in the oceans. Around twelve percent of them glow. Claes has been studying these elusive...

The Ed's Up #94

I've Got a New Job! Before I hand you over to your regularly scheduled dose of stories, some news! I'll be joining The Atlantic as their new full-time...

The Ed's Up #93

This Beetle is Ruining Your Coffee With the Help of Bacteria "I am writing a book about partnerships between animals and microbes. In the process, I have...

The Ed's Up #92

With Sonar-Reflecting Leaves, Plant Lures Bats to Poo in it "Imagine a bat flying through the jungle of Borneo. It calls out to find a place to spend the...

The Ed's Up #91

Single-Celled Creature Has Eye Made of Domesticated Microbes "The strangest eyes in the ocean—eyes so weird that we can’t even be sure that they are...

The Ed's Up #90

Scientists Finally Decide Which Bit of This Weird Animal is the Head "In 1977, British palaeontologist Simon Conway-Morris discovered the fossil of a truly...

The Ed's Up #89

Baboon-Trackers Herald New Age of Animal Behaviour Research "By fitting wild olive baboons with sophisticated GPS collars, which automatically record their...

The Ed's Up #88

How Do African Grasslands Support So Many Plant-Eaters? "Across the savannahs of Africa, millions of stomachs are busy converting plant tissue into animal...

The Ed's Up #87

The Dragon Autopsy Last month, I watched a team of four dragon-flayers dissecting a Komodo dragon. Here's what happened, featuring Game of Thrones, some...

The Ed's Up #86

Octopuses, and Maybe Squid, Can Sense Light With Their Skin "Each chromatophore is an elastic sac of pigment, surrounded by a starburst of muscles. If the...

The Ed's Up #85

Can The Microbes You Leave Behind Be Used to Identify You? "When you touch a surface, you leave behind fingerprints—distinctive swirling patterns of oils...

The Ed's Up #84

New Loki Microbe is Closest Relative to All Complex Life "Loki’s Castle lies midway between Greenland and Norway, around 2,300 metres below the ocean...