Gene Expression
Archives for April, 2009
African genetic structure
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 I’ve been fine tuning Ubuntu all day with goodies and getting drivers to work right, so I missed this paper on African genetics: Africa is the source of all modern humans, but characterization of genetic variation and of relationships among populations across the continent has been enigmatic. We studied 121 African populations, 4 African American…
Religious people support torture
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 John Schwenkler points me to Rod Dreher’s shock that religious people seem to support torture more than the non-religious: And get this: the more often you go to church, the more pro-torture you’re likely to be! What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?! Very sad indeed. John notes: There are plenty of data…
Noninvasive Down Syndrome test no go (for now)
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 I blogged about this a few months ago, but Dan MacArthur reports that the firm which was going to roll it out first claims that it doesn’t really work as advertised.
Pakistan is already an Islamic State
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 So claims Ali Eteraz: Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam…
Egypt going to kill its pigs?
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 UN says Egypt pig cull real mistake: The United Nations has called Egypt’s move to cull 400,000 pigs as a precaution against swine flu “a real mistake”. The Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the pigs on Wednesday, saying it could help quell any panic in the country that is largely Muslim, who view pigs…
Drink wine to live longer!
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 I’m in the mood for a “feel good” story with the past week’s fixation in swine flu. Half A Glass Of Wine A Day May Boost Life Expectancy By Five Years: The Dutch authors base their findings on a total of 1,373 randomly selected men whose cardiovascular health and life expectancy at age 50 were…
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
Posted by Razib Khan on April 29, 2009 In the wake of Predictably Irrational, check out Tyler Cowen’s endorsement of Geoffrey Miller’s new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller is a good writer, so I’m assuming it will be a page-turner, but he does tend to be “provocative” in all the best & worst ways when it comes to popular science.…
Post-Cretaceous Dinosaurs
Posted by Razib Khan on April 29, 2009 New Geochronologic And Stratigraphic Evidence Confirms The Paleocene Age Of the Dinosaur-Bearing Ojo Alamo Sandstone And Animas Formation In The San Juan Basin, New Mexico and Colorado: …An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage…
Around ScienceBlogs
Posted by Razib Khan on April 29, 2009 Do you love or hate Cilantro? K-T extinction debates: cranky “skeptics” or reasonable science? Modularity and scalability The elegant logic of dopamine A Beacon from the Invisible Universe
One New World population expansion
Posted by Razib Khan on April 29, 2009 Haplotypic Background of a Private Allele at High Frequency in the Americas: Recently, the observation of a high-frequency private allele, the 9-repeat allele at microsatellite D9S1120, in all sampled Native American and Western Beringian populations has been interpreted as evidence that all modern Native Americans descend primarily from a single founding population. However, this inference…