Articles by Barry Palevitz

Courtesy Marisa Pedulla and Graham Hatfull.  SAME BUT DIFFERENT: electron micrograph of mycobacteriophages Barnyard (left), and Cjw1 (above). While morphologically similar, the two phages are quite distinct genomically and have fewer than 3% of their genes in common. When high school teacher Debbie Jacobs-Sera showed up with two of her students at Graham Hatfull's door at the University of Pittsburgh, it took only minutes for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator to put them t

If you teach introductory biology, you've probably heard this refrain at least once: 'I had to learn it, but I don't believe it.' The 'it,' of course, is evolution. The admission usually comes at the end of the semester, when grades are safely in. Invariably, when you ask why, the student cites religious belief. Somebody once said, if you're not prepared to have your basic ideas challenged, you don't belong in college. I don't expect students to accept everything they learn, but in this case

Photo: Barry Palevitz HELP OR HINDRANCE? Ephedra-containing products like those pictured above are coming under increased scrutiny. You've probably seen the ads in the supermarket checkout aisle, or on radio and TV. "I lost 63 pounds with Hydroxycut," screams the headline in Cosmopolitan, above pictures of a woman going from corpulent to bathing-beauty trim in 19 weeks. "Diet Fuel changes the shape of your life," claims another ad, this time sporting an ab-flashing model in boxing gloves

Photo: Courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden AN ENTREATING FIND: Flowers of the Hooglandia tree, a newly discovered plant genus from New Caledonia When Peter Lowry and Gordon McPherson explored the rich flora of New Caledonia last May, the last thing they expected to find was a new genus. Discovering new species isn't unusual, but a new genus? "It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience," admits Lowry, a head curator for the Missouri Botanical Garden. Lowry is based at the Natural History Muse

Artwork ©2001 Alan Campbell Studios COSTA RICA BEAUTY: Campbell's work includes images like this Costa Rican banana tree. Alan Campbell's studio in a second-story loft overlooking downtown Athens, Ga., has the unmistakable stamp of a painter. Daylight streams through large windows; brushes, paints, and tools sit in assorted cans and mugs; canvasses and prints stand on easels, lean against walls, and lie flat on tables. The University of Georgia's (UGA) north campus quad, home to th

Finding acryl-amide--a reagent biochemists use to separate proteins, and a neurotoxin and suspected carcinogen--in fried and baked foods was surprising enough.1 What really puzzled food chemists was how it gets there. Now four research groups may have solved the mystery. In papers from the University of Reading in England and the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland,2,3 and a report from Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, delivered before the Association of Official Analyti

Photo: Courtesy of Lincoln P. Brower, Sweet Briar College  FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL: Overwintering monarch butterflies on the ground after a snow and rain storm in the Sierra Chincua, January 20, 1983. Many of these survived because the temperature didn't plunge below freezing following the storm. Across my dreams with nets of wonder I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love --Bob Lind Jan. 11, 2002 started a bad weekend for monarch butterflies. Late that night, an unusually powerful

Image: Getty Images Every research scientist knows that discovery often depends as much on happenstance--serendipity--as it does on methodical searching. If a group of researchers from Stockholm didn't know it earlier, they certainly learned the lesson over the last five years. The presence of acrylamide bound to hemoglobin in laboratory workers who perform polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis--a commonly used method to separate and analyze proteins-- wasn't necessarily surprising, but when Emma

Image: Courtesy of Tim Elkins BRUTE FORCE: Remnant of an appressorium formed on Mylar. The appressorium produced a peg-like extension that penetrated the film, leaving a round hole. (Reprinted with permission, Annual Review of Microbiology, 50:491-512, 1996.) "The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with BLASTING, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish." Deuteronom

Photo: Courtesy of M. Matsuoka, Reprinted with permission from Nature ©2001 A COMPARISON: The effect of a mutant gibberellin-biosynthesis gene is shown in rice plants; on the left, wild type; on the right, IR8 (sd1). During the summer of 1997, two research groups succeeded in bringing closure to a classic tale in genetics. After 131 years, they identified one of Mendel's pea genes at the molecular level. The gene, called Le, controls stem length--plants with defective copies are sho

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 18 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Film Fest Fetes Science At Issue: How do you communicate science without dumbing it down? | By Barry A. Palevitz Image: Erica P. Johnson It's getting to be an old story: the National Science Board recently concluded, "Science literacy in the U.S. is fairly low." Moreover, said the board, "most Americans are unfamiliar with the scientifi

Volume 16 | Issue 13 | 8 | Jun. 24, 2002 Previous | Next Awash in DNA News By Barry A. Palevitz Like most writers, I wield a mean scissors. I love to clip articles from assorted newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and research journals. Who knows, I tell myself, maybe the flotsam and jetsam will come in handy some day. Sometimes the clippings sort themselves into meaningful piles (I gave up file

I never met Stephen Jay Gould, though I did attend a lecture he gave two years ago. Still, that hour explained many of the opinions I'd heard of him: love, hate, joy, envy, and respect. Like a lot of people who make a difference, Gould was a study in contrasts. You also had to wonder whether he ran according to a different clock than the rest of us. The campy cliché 24/7 didn't apply to Gould—he could not have fit so much in a 24-hour day and a 60-year life. Gould was first and forem

When President George W. Bush signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law early this year, he came close to penning his approval to a provision that many scientists say would have opened the door to antievolution lessons in America's classrooms. Congress passed the new law, which overhauls federal primary and high school education mandates including testing requirements, after a joint conference committee resolved differences between House and Senate versions of the bill. The Sen

An article in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal questioned whether forensics courses belong in the elementary and high school curricula.1 Teachers and forensics professionals are promoting the subject because it exemplifies the kind of evidence-based, objective investigation that permeates science. It also captures the attention of students weaned on TV crime stories. Burlington, NC-based Carolina Biological Supply Co. is helping out with several forensics packages, including kits on DNA