Before I head for Utah, let me direct your attention to two articles of mine in tomorrow’s New York Times. They don’t have a whole lot in common except they are examples of cool biology…

1. Virus traps. Here’s a case where ecology, evolution, and medicine all come together in an intriguing mix. You can think of any population of animals, plants, or other organisms as a leaky bucket under a running faucet. The population is boosted by sources of new individuals, and drained by sinks. Sources may include rapidly reproducing individuals, or immigrants from other populations. Sinks include the death of individuals in the population, or their failure to reproduce. Source-sink dynamics are important to ecologists, in part