razib
Posts by this author
February 17, 2010
To the left I've juxtaposed the images of the four Bushmen males whose genomes were analyzed in the recent Nature paper and compared to Desmond Tutu. I've added to the montage a photo of a Swedish and Chinese man. The Nature paper looked at the HapMap data sets which had within them whites from…
February 17, 2010
Wow, the Amy Bishop post attracted a lot of comments. I've been hearing/reading a lot about Bishop's brushes with the law over the years over the past few days. One of the issues seems to be that she didn't have a traceable record, and that probably was one reason prosecutors were lenient in 2002…
February 17, 2010
There's a new paper out in Nature which details the genomes of several Bushmen, and how they relate to other humans, and one particular Bantu speaking individual, archbishop Desmond Tutu. It's open access, Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from southern Africa. I haven't read the whole thing, but…
February 16, 2010
Lactase persistence results in the ability to break down the lactose sugar in milk as an adult, lactase being the enzyme which breaks down lactose. If one can not digest that sugar, and still consumes milk, then one exhibits the symptoms of lactose intolerance. Originally diagnosed as a disease it…
February 16, 2010
Congratulations to Dr. Daniel MacArthur & the Mrs.
February 16, 2010
At my other blog 10 questions for Peter Turchin. Turchin is an ecologist-turned-quantitative historian.
February 15, 2010
Analysis of the Putative Remains of a European Patron Saint-St. Birgitta:
Saint Birgitta (Saint Bridget of Sweden) lived between 1303 and 1373 and was designated one of Europe's six patron saints by the Pope in 1999. According to legend, the skulls of St. Birgitta and her daughter Katarina are…
February 15, 2010
Dr. Daniel MacArthur reports on shenanigans in his homeland, Australian insurance company offers discounted genome scans to customers; read the fine print!:
A reader pointed me to this article in the Australian news: it appears that a major Australian insurance company, NIB, is planning to offer…
February 15, 2010
One of the great things about science is that old orthodoxies regularly get overturned; it's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course the personal downside is that it means models which scholars have invested their lives and intellectual capital into may turn out to be unsupportable, but at the end of…
February 15, 2010
Ed Yong reviews a new paper:
The social interactions that come naturally to most people are difficult for people with autism and Asperger syndrome. Simple matters like making eye contact, reading expressions and working out what someone else is thinking can be big challenges, even for "high-…
February 15, 2010
Another instance of a really dumb plagiarist, from The New York Times Corrections:
In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, a Times reporter appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other…
February 15, 2010
This comment by Lassi Hippeläinen deserves notice:
Sorry if I sound pedantic - I worked many years as a system architect in computer secutiry - but this argument will not go anywhere, unless its basic terminology is clear. More specifically, there are two concepts that are getting mixed up all the…
February 15, 2010
It just gets weirder. Ipswich neighbors recall confrontations with Amy Bishop:
Bishop once stopped a local ice cream truck from coming into their neighborhood. According to WBZ-1030 radio, she said it because her own kids were lactose intolerant, and she didn't think it was fair that her kids…
February 14, 2010
Wait Ends as Canada Wins Gold at Home:
Three men stood in the sea of red at Cypress Mountain on Sunday, their chests bare except for paint. Euphoria surrounded them, men and women, young and old, who waved Canadian flags and clanged cowbells and danced to the Black Eyed Peas.
Minutes earlier,…
February 14, 2010
A few weeks ago I remarked on the relatively high current defense spending for the United States. In hindsight I think this was somewhat unfair, the proportion of the budget that the United States spends on defense is rather small in a world-historical context. I was reminded of this by a datum in…
February 14, 2010
Dr. Daniel MacArthur returns from hiatus, and observes that deCODE is now in the advanced stages of corporate death. Pointers to a Newsweek article and other bloggers at Dr. MacArthur's post. Over at Gene Expression Classic p-ter points out that Small genetic effects do not preclude drug…
February 14, 2010
One of the interesting aspects ensuing from the rise of molecular phylogenetics is that the trees are generally concordant in broad strokes with older research which was based on morphology. This is not too surprising, as nature does tend to show some intelligible patterns which can be cross-…
February 13, 2010
I have pointed before to dating research which shows a stronger race-bias from women than men, correcting for physical appearance. In other words, if a man found a woman attractive the extra bonus for being of the same race was relatively marginal compared to the inverse. Well, it seems that this…
February 12, 2010
Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service:
When Google introduced Buzz -- its answer to Facebook and Twitter -- it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically…
February 12, 2010
Over at Slate Jack Shafer talks about Gerald Posner's plagiarism. Weirdly Posner seems to be positing an "efficient markets" model of why he couldn't be a plagiarist:
Clearly, if I were a serial plagiarizer, I would have scanned my own drafts with such [plagiarism detection] software before…
February 11, 2010
Genome-Wide Association Study in Asian Populations Identifies Variants in ETS1 and WDFY4 Associated with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus:
In this study, we first conducted a genome-wide association study in a Hong Kong Chinese population, followed by replication in three other cohorts from Mainland…
February 11, 2010
The End of the Space Age:
It's important to recognize, though, that the decision in question belongs to all of us, and not just to Barack Obama. The administration wouldn't be cutting the manned spaceflight program if Americans were still enthusiastic about going to the stars -- if space…
February 11, 2010
Breeding Ancient Cattle Back from Extinction:
The only place to see an aurochs in nature these days? A cave painting. The enormous wild cattle that once roamed the European plains have been extinct since 1627, when the last survivor died in a Polish nature reserve. But this could soon change thanks…
February 10, 2010
By now, you probably know that there is a specter haunting Europe, and that specter is Argentina. Greece's debt crisis is putting the spotlight on the PIIGS nations of the Eurozone, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.
One thing to note is that besides mismanaging their fiscal situation, 4…
February 10, 2010
What do you think? I think the probability is lower that it will flop like Wave in terms of widespread use because I can recognize what the application is trying to do. It seems to be pushing into a recognizable niche of social content aggregation and organization, though since it hooks into stuff…
February 10, 2010
The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence:
The predisposition of human beings toward spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors is measured by a supposedly stable personality trait called self-transcendence. Although a few neuroimaging studies suggest that…
February 10, 2010
Interesting that I just pointed to Neandertal DNA, a really big story just came out on ancient Greenlander genetics, Whole Genome of Ancient Human Is Decoded:
The genome of a man who lived on the western coast of Greenland some 4,000 years ago has been decoded, thanks to the surprisingly good…
February 10, 2010
Archaeology has a very interesting piece up, Should We Clone Neanderthals?. It begins with the nitty-gritty of ancient DNA extraction & sequencing, moves to the possible avenues of cloning, and of course the bioethical conundrums that we might be placed in. I know that there is an expectation…