In Chapter 8, author Debora MacKenzie recounts an unfortunate history of baselessly blaming disease outbreaks on groups perceived as outsiders.

In Chapter 11, “Man-made diseases,” author Robert Perlman describes how socioeconomic health disparities arise in hierarchical societies.

In Chapter 2, "Progressive Desire," author Erika Lorraine Milam explores sexual selection’s incursion into evolutionary theory.

Scientists around the world investigate how bat immune systems cope with viral attacks and how this information could be used to keep humans safe.

Graphic: Cathleen Heard A week after the controversial XIII International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, a much smaller gathering in Atlanta took a broader view of the current emergence and reemergence of many infectious diseases. The International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases 2000, held July 16-19, attracted more than 2,000 attendees representing 35 nations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Society for Microbiology, the Council of State

In the book’s introduction, author and neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky explains his fascination with the biology of violence and other dark parts of human behavior.

Courtesy of Genevieve Anderson If not for Nobel laureates Thomas Hunt Morgan, Eric R. Kandel, and Sydney Brenner, the notion of a general behavioral model might seem odd. Behaviors, after all, are determined by an animal's evolutionary history and ecological niche. They are often idiosyncratic, shared in detail only by closely related species. But, thanks to Morgan's research in the early 20th century, and Kandel's and Brenner's work over the past 35 years, the fly Drosophila melanogaster, t

Sex on Earth, Wild Connection, The Classification of Sex, and XL Love

The Scientist covered some of the events that made this year's festival memorable.

Plague has earned a place in history books as the Black Death of medieval Europe, and in novels, from Albert Camus' classic The Plague, to the more recent Year of Wonders.1,2 A different medium for telling the tale of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis is its genome, recently sequenced by researchers at the Sanger Centre, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine.3 In addi