monkey's uncle

A long-anticipated paper (by me anyway!) has finally been published in this week’s issue of Nature.  In this paper, we show that wild chimpanzees living in the Gombe National Park in western Tanzania on the shores of Lake Tanganyika appear to die from AIDS-like illness when infected with the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV).  Many African [...]

[Read more →]

Well, it’s happened again.  My work has been written up in Science but I am not mentioned.  I’m actually not that concerned this time — we’re going to submit the paper for publication soon. I’ve been telling myself (and other people) that this thing we’ve ben working on (all the while being very cryptic about what [...]

[Read more →]

On the topic of science reporting, it’s nice to see it done right.

[Read more →]

Our new paper at PNAS has been out a day now and Wired Magazine has already done a story on it.  It’s a nice piece but it gets several things hilariously wrong. It says:
Bird’s team recently published a study on “fire stick farming,” a traditional method of ecosystem management still used by aborigines in Australia’s Western Desert. [...]

[Read more →]

We have a new paper out in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.  The paper suggests that subsistence related burning increases local landscape heterogeneity and may promote biodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert.  What’s really interesting about this is that promoting biodiversity is not the goal of individual hunters – they [...]

[Read more →]

A news story reports the outbreak of abalone viral ganglioneuritis in Tasmania.  This is the first report of the disease in Tasmanian fisheries.  In fact, the disease appears to be quite newly emergent since, according to the Department of Primary Industries for the State of Victoria, the virus was previously not described in Australia prior to 2005.  Since [...]

[Read more →]

A new study of tuberculosis (TB) prevalence in captive elephants (presumably Elephas maximus) in India, reported in the Times of India, shows that approximately 15% of southern India’s captive elephants test positive for TB.  This is a big problem for the health and well-being elephants.  The study makes me wonder (1) what TB prevalence in free-ranging elephants [...]

[Read more →]

A very sad story appeared on PROMED-mail recently about a die-off of elephants around Nakabolelwa, Namibia.  While still not completely investigated, the most likely cause seems to be anthrax.  Bad news for elephant conservation. If anthrax infection turns out truly to be the cause of mortality, then it raises all sorts of problems.  Chief among [...]

[Read more →]

About a month ago, I posted on the mysterious deaths of crocodiles in the Olifants river system in Kruger National Park, South Africa.  A recent update indicates that the cause of the fatal pansteatitis outbreak is still unknown despite intensive study.  An interdisciplinary research captured 11 live crocodiles and found that seven of them were afflicted [...]

[Read more →]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have just issued a new report on the ongoing outbreak of Salmonella serotype Saintpaul infection. Since April, 1237 people have been infected.  The investigation has continued to focus on raw tomatoes but also jalepeño (and serrano) chiles and cilantro.  This further supports my previous speculation, based on the age profile of [...]

[Read more →]