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If you link to this weblog from your weblog, please update links: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ If you have not updated your feeds, please do so now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog The old feed address will point for another week or so to the new feed, but eventually it…

Update your bookmarks: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp And RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog If you have a weblog that links to ScienceBlogs GNXP, I would appreciate you update the link for the sake of PageRank. There isn't much to say about the move. There wasn't one big…

That's all I have to say to Eric Michael Johnson's post, Ann Coulter, Hate Speech, and Free Societies. OK, seriously, from what I recall Eric is an American, though resident in the forgotten north. American absolutist stances on free speech are not shared by most Western societies, so demanding…

The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia: With the exception of Neanderthals, from which DNA sequences of numerous individuals have now been determined...the number and genetic relationships of other hominin lineages are largely unknown. Here we report a…

In this diavlog with Glenn Loury the behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan recounts the results of an experiment. - If given the option of paying $100 for an item vs. $80 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $80 and going across town - If…

You've probably heard about the research in the press, but please see Derek Lowe for perspective. The difference between high fructose corn syrup and sugar as an additive may, or may not, be problematic. But the uncertainty in this area is why I try and avoid excessively processed foods*, there's…

Not Exactly Rocket Science, authored by a certain Edmund Yong. Congratulations Mr. Yong, but I will admit being less than surprised. Update: And also, congratulations to all the other winners, several of whom are in my "regular reads."

I have a short piece up at Comment is Free at The Guardian, The origins of morality do not matter. Its flavor is a bit different from my typical blog posts because the format enforces more brevity, so I decided to try and leverage some analogies. I conclude: ... Our moral consensus is a river whose…

The Andrew Pollack piece which I hinted at came out a few days ago: Consumers Slow to Embrace the Age of Genomics. For what it's worth, I think this chart from Dr. Daniel MacArthur is right on: This too will pass. I believe that like the internet the knowledge and analysis of our genetic…

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is looking for his male Irish forebear using genetics: Well, it turns out that the men sharing that Ui Neill haplotype tended to have certain surnames. If we use those surnames, we narrow the number of possibilities in Allegany and Hampshire counties to 178 men born between…

The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background to appreciate it in any depth (nor do I now).

At least in this case, Troglomorphism, trichobothriotaxy and typhlochactid phylogeny (Scorpiones, Chactoidea): more evidence that troglobitism is not an evolutionary dead-end: The scorpion family Typhlochactidae Mitchell, 1971 is endemic to eastern Mexico and exclusively troglomorphic. Six of the…

A few weeks ago I commented on the paper about the origin of the small dog phenotype in the Middle East. Now The New York Times has an article on a newer paper, New Finding Puts Origins Of Dogs in Middle East. Here's the conclusion: Dog domestication and human settlement occurred at the same time…

A week ago I observed that commenting was being transformed with the spread of Disqus and Echo. The Big Money has now introduced Echo: The comments themselves are also more interactive. Any of your postings can be shared with your friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or any of your…

14th season begins tonight. The website. You can usually get the episode a bit earlier at Allabout-SP.net.

Dienekes has reposted some of the abstracts from the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This one caught my eye, Genetic analyses reveal a history of serial founder effects, admixture between long separated founding populations in Oceania, and interbreeding with archaic…

A few weeks ago I had dinner and drinks with an old friend who works for the firm which invented the x86 series of microprocessors. He's doing well financially right now, and was very bullish on his firm. More specifically it seems that they're on a hiring binge (he knows because he's been on…

How Privacy Vanishes Online. Pretty banal actually. Social networking has really changed things. As I've said before I'm fascinated by the large number of people who, even those who want to be anonymous, enter in their real email addresses when leaving a comment. There seems a default "trust unless…

Over the past week I've been asked via email and on message boards about about David Shenk's new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. Since I haven't read the book I can't really comment, but I did finally listen to Will Wilkinson's…

There's an article in The New York Times on the recent paper which extracted genetic material from remains in Xinjiang dated to 4,000 years ago. Remember that these remains exhibited male lineages which were west Eurasian, specifically R1a1, while the female lineages (mtDNA) were more heterogeneous…

The Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition in Cova Gran (Catalunya, Spain) and the extinction of Neanderthals in the Iberian Peninsula: The excavations carried out in Cova Gran de Santa Linya (Southeastern PrePyrenees, Catalunya, Spain) have unearthed a new archaeological sequence attributable to…

The strange case of the twins of Kodinji: The latest survey, from December 2009, counted 265 pairs of twins in the village, which is home to about 3,000 families and 13,000 inhabitants. This equates to a twinning rate of about 30 to 35 per 1,000 live births within a radius of about 500 metres. The…

Randomized trial of vitamin D supplementation to prevent seasonal influenza A in schoolchildren: Design: From December 2008 through March 2009, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial comparing vitamin D3 supplements (1200 IU/d) with placebo in schoolchildren. The primary…

And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning is a litany of how the mapping from Hebrew to other languages has resulted in a distortion of the precise idiom of the original. I actually thought the best example of this given was a non-Biblical one, the fact that English-…

Via a comment, a site which you will love, or which will drive you insane, Complete Small Dogs Guide. I found this story about a chihuahua carried away by a large bird, only to return to its owner.

This comment from Chris is interesting: I would speculate that the the massive productivity gains were due to a massive resorting of American society along cognitive lines; from 1940 to 1970 a large number of high ability people who were previously locked into agriculture and industry were able to…

In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt: At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition exceeding $30,000 a year. ... The Apollo…