In the news
This Is a Truly Lousy Experiment About Evolution
by Ed Yong, The Atlantic,
Mar. 13, 2019
“Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons,” wrote one Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. Four years earlier..."
Read the rest of this article - here
Read commentary by D. Rozen: "Lice dodge death by going to the light" in Journal of Experimental Biology - here
Read the University of Utah press release - here
Sex, lice and video tape
by Lisa Potter, Univ. Utah
"Biologists drove the divergence of different-sized feather lice from a single population. In 4 years the evolved lice had trouble mating with each other, a sign of speciastion. They caught it on tape..."
Watch a 1min video summary and read the press release here
Read the Daily Beast article - here
Far Side of Science
by Lisa Potter, Univ. Utah
"Since Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” cartoons hit newsstands in 1979, Dale Clayton, an evolutionary parasitologist at the University of Utah and appreciator of the wacky, has loved the comic’s tongue-in-cheek representation of the natural world and the scientists who study it....""
Read the rest of this article - here
Birds Fight Alien Invasion
by Lee Siegel, Univ. Utah
"Unlike Hawaii and other island groups, no native bird has gone extinct in the Galapagos Islands, although some are in danger. But University of Utah biologists found that finches – the birds Darwin studied – develop antibodies against two parasites that moved to the Galapagos, suggesting the birds can fight the alien invaders...."
Read the rest of this article - here
Main Content
A few examples of other media coverage:
May 19, 2017 - "Endangered Species Day" by J. Hanson - here
Dec 18, 2015 - paper in Journal of Applied Ecology, read press release "Darwin's Finches May Face Extinction" - here
May 6, 2014 - article in Scientific American -"Darwin's Finches Stamp Out Deadly Parasite with Help from Cotton Balls"; by J. Morrison - here
May 5 2014 - paper in Current Biology, read press release "Is Self Fumigation for the Birds?" - here
Dec 6, 2010 - paper in Journal of Medical Entomology, read press release "The LouseBuster Returns" - here
Sept. 9, 2010 - paper in American Naturalist highlighted by J. Coyne's blog Why Evolotion is True - here
Sept. 6, 2010 - paper in American Naturalist highlighted as"On birds of many colors, lice dress the part" by S. N. Bhanoo The New York Times - here
Aug. 25, 2010 - paper in American Naturalist highlighted as "Evolutionary biology: lice in hiding" Nature - here
Nov 6, 2006 - paper in Pediatrics, read press release "The LouseBuster kills" - here
Oct 4, 2004 - paper in Plos Biology, read press release "Of lice and men" -here
Dec 8, 2003 - paper in PNAS, read press release "How lice and bird feathers stick together" - here