Tagged: science

Matt Tocheri knows hobbits pretty well: he’s been studying their wristbones for years.

Well, not quite hobbits, per se, but homo floresiensis, a hominid fossil discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia, which at first glance appeared to be a small version of a modern human. However, researchers argue that these ‘hobbits’ are in fact h. floresiensis, and make up a new branch of the human evolutionary tree.

If you're a young black or latino student plotting your future, do you look up to athletes or entrepreneurs? Entertainers or innovators?

If you've ever had a bacterial infection like staph or strep throat, your doctor may have prescribed penicillin. But if you've had the flu or a common cold virus, penicillin won't work. That's because antibacterials only kill bacteria, and both the flu and the common cold are viruses. So for illnesses like the flu, doctors prescribe antiviral drugs, which target the mechanisms that viruses use to reproduce.

"For example, there are antivirals for the flu that interfere with the virus as it tries to get out of its host cell," says science writer Carl Zimmer. "So this molecule latches on to that particular protein that the virus uses to escape, and interferes with it so that the virus is trapped inside."

Roger Cone is a microbiologist, not a politician. He struggles with a basic truth: For all the scientific acceptance of evolution, many Americans simply don't believe it is factually accurate.