30 Jan 2012
by Rob Dunnin Articles, Myrmecos
How a group of 19-year-old undergraduate students discovered a common but unnoticed ant species in plain view in New York City.
This story of discovery has a concrete beginning. I remember the day I got the call. I had just returned from a hiking trip in one of the oldest forests in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the phone rang. It was an invitation to help lead an expedition into the dirty bowels of New York City. More
30 Jan 2012
by Rob Dunnin Articles, Scientific American
“The smell of a body is the (bacteria themselves) which we breathe in with our nose and mouth, which we suddenly possess as though (they) were (the body’s) most secret substance and, to put the matter in a nutshell, its nature. The smell which is in me is the fusion of the (bacteria) with my body…”
Adulterated, in the interest of good science, from Sartre 1967, p. 174.
A man can live many lives. Paul Ehrlich has. Once, he was a butterfly biologist. Another time, he wrote the book calledThe Population Bomb, a book that triggered global conversations about the fate of humanity. Still another, he described the relationship between plants and the animals that eat them. A plant evolves, he says, to escape its herbivores and then the herbivores evolve, in response. This war goes on, he found, forever. More
30 Jan 2012
by Rob Dunnin Articles, Scientific American
Ten steps to a healthier life and more wealth through embracing the bacteria around you.
Book titles are difficult to choose. In theory, a perfect title is concise, compelling, enticing and, oh by the way, accurately conveys some aspect of the book’s contents. In practice, most titles involve more compromise than perfection. The working title of my first book wasUnknown. The book was about the biological unknown and what remains to be discovered as told through the stories of the discoverers and would-be discoverers. I liked the title. It seemed to capture some essence of what I was up to and offered a good conversation starter. People would ask what I was doing and I would say “oh, going to spend the afternoon in the Unknown.” The editors were not so sure. One day I received an email forwarded from someone within my publishing house that said, “when is Dunn going to decide on a title?” At first I did not understand and then it became clear. The cover page of my book read, “Title: Unknown.” I got the point. The book became Every Living Thing. More
02 Jan 2012
by Rob Dunnin Articles, Scientific American
OK, it is time for a some year’s end soul searching and that searching leads me to the inescapable conclusion that I am apparently spending too much time thinking about the life in peoples bodies, bedrooms, and bathrooms.
It started off innocently. I finished my book on The Wild Life of Our Bodies this year and so was left with many, many stories I wanted to follow up on but that didn’t fit in the book or hadn’t yet emerged when the book was finished. More
02 Jan 2012
by Rob Dunnin Articles, Scientific American
Your appendix may save your life…that is, if you have one. If you don’t, well, I will get to that. First I want to tell you about a guy I know, Bill Parker
Bill Parker grew up in Arkansas and is, by my precise calculation, fifty percent pure backwoods Arkansan and fifty percent intellectual wild man. Throw a little seminary training on top and you have a decent measure of the guy—complicated, interested, clever and unbounded. You are as likely to encounter him out on the streets of Durham trying to catch a rat as you are in his lab at the Duke University School of Medicine. He is one of a kind. If you want to keep an eye on someone who is likely to come up with an idea that will change things, I’d keep an eye on Bill Parker. He is also, for the record, the guy to keep an eye on if you want to know how to catch a rat. More
31 Dec 2011
by Rob Dunnin Articles, BBC Wildlife Magazine
My buddy Rich and I get into trouble, not drinking trouble mind you, or trouble with the law. No, we get into the kind of trouble where afterward you think, “shit, we could have died.” I have, in no particular order found myself in the middle of a river with Rich thinking, “we are not going to make it across,” on a ledge with Rich thinking, “we are not going to make it down,” and (and this is today’s story), in the middle of the Amazon, lost and losing a mano a mano confrontation with a group of monkeys.
It never starts off wrong, and this one didn’t either. We were at a research station that will rename nameless to protect the innocent somewhere down the Tiputini River in Ecuador. Against the admonishment of others we had headed off down a poorly laid trail and then halfway down the trail had followed an animal path, then the sound of a large bird, then the sound of a group of monkeys. I have ended up in some marvelous corners of the world after having chased an animal down a trail and this was no exception. We were in a tall, open forest with large-buttressed trees all around us. It was primordial in that way that tropical forest is “supposed to be” but rarely is. Just above us were the monkeys, who were at this time looking back down at us. I’m not sure what they were thinking, but they couldn’t have possibly been as pleased themselves as we were with ourselves at that moment. More
31 Dec 2011
by Rob Dunnin Articles, BBC Wildlife Magazine
We loped naked out of Africa, dressed in little more than parasites. Early humans radiated into Europe and Asia clad in trematodes, tapeworms, bacteria, mites, and lice. We have come a long way from those cave-dwelling, howling, grunting, stone-pounding days. We have built skyscrapers where there were plains. We have landed on the moon. But through it all, lice have held tight. In 1998, 1 in 4 American children had head lice, more than were infected a hundred years ago, and probably as many as our naked progenitors. Lice are gaining on us. If they have a say (and it appears they do), man is less an island than a ship, coming together to exchange stowaways in the night. The story of human lice is really a story about us, where we go, and where we have been. It is a story that begins when the bodies of the continents were still fused. More
How a group of 19-year-old undergraduate students discovered a common but unnoticed ant species in plain view in New York City.
