Social Sciences
dgmacarthur | November 3, 2009New-technology DNA sequencing provider Complete Genomics will provide near-complete genome sequences of 100 individuals to the Institute for Systems Biology, driving the first ever association study for a complex trait using whole-genome sequencing. Here's the press release, and GenomeWeb has some additional information.
This is pretty exciting stuff:
The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) and Complete Genomics Inc. announced today that they are embarking on a large-scale human genome sequencing study of Huntington`s disease (HD). ISB has engaged Complete Genomics to sequence 100 genomes,…
drorzel | November 3, 2009
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
"I'm not real sure how I got here in the first place, and when you think about it you really have to go all the way back to school, and mom thought I should be a doctor and dad thought I should be an industrial wood lathe and I wanted to be the Cenozoic Era and we tried to work out a compromise but lookin back it was really the kinda situation where nobody was gonna end up really satisfied in the end"
(tags: fafblog silly blogs)
Unsolicited Advice X: How to Frame a Winning Proposal | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"Pretty much every…
rskloot | November 2, 2009
Some interesting news about the breast cancer patent lawsuit I wrote about for Slate's Double X Magazine a few months ago: A federal district court has just agreed to hear the case. When the lawsuit was first filed, many legal experts I talked to said they were sure the case would get thrown out of court for it's unusual approach, namely that it claims that the practice of patenting genes is unconstitutional See my story about the case here. Filings and other documents related to the case available here. And see below for the full press release about today's news:
Court Upholds Right…
cwilcox | November 2, 2009Science is for the people... so welcome, people, to the newest edition of Scientia Pro Publica! Sit down, buckle up, and get ready to be taken on a wild ride that includes everything from vampires to vegetarians, the dawn of the universe to current affairs, and anything in between!
While the ghosts and goblins may have gone back into hiding after this weekend's All Hallow's Eve, the debate still rages at Southern Fried Science as to whether vampires can survive a zombie apocalypse. So if you haven't had enough Halloween, be sure to weigh in your $0.02!
The biosphere seems all shook up about…
mikethemadbiologist | November 1, 2009Some thoughts on the Theology of Jerks. Earlier this week, there was some minor amusement over Christian scholar Richard Beck's claim, at his blog Experimental Theology, that Christians (presumably he means fundamentalists) are lousy tippers:
Take, for example, how Christians tip and behave in restaurants. If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry you know the reputation of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Millions of Christians go to lunch after church on Sundays and their behavior is abysmal. The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America today is the…
revere | October 31, 2009Statins for influenza are in the news again, this time because of a paper given at the Annual Meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). We'll get to it in a moment, but first a little background.
Statins are cholesterol lowering drugs that are taken by tens of millions of people (including me; I take 20 mg of generic simvastatin a day). The statins are a group of drugs that competitively inhibit an enzyme, 3 hydroxy 3 methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMG-CoA reductase). They are quite effective in lowering cholesterol and have an excellent safety profile (not perfect,…
jrosenhouse | October 30, 2009I had intended to leave this subject behind, at least for a while, but Josh Rosenau has a lengthy post up that I think merits a reply. See also this post and the ensuing comments.
On several occasions at this blog (here and here for example) I have endorsed the efforts of the NCSE and other science advocacy groups to reach out to religious groups. I think it is great that NCSE has a permanent employee devoted to such outreach. Religious supporters of evolution have been essential in every major victory, both legal and political, our side can claim. If we can open people's eyes to the…
grrlscientist | October 30, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published recently…
cpikas | October 30, 2009Today was a little better. To be honest, itâs probably just that I was a bit more tolerant after I slept in a couple of hours before showing up in the middle of the second session.
I started out in: Scientific Practices in Research and in Learning: Cyberinfrastructure Meets Cyberlearning chaired by Christine Borgman from UCLA. I came in a little late, during Curtis Wongâs demo of Microsoftâs Worldwide Telescope â that thing is super cool. Seriously. It can display all sorts of data in layers and then link out to external information including stuff from ADS. After him, Alyssa Goodman of ADS…
razib | October 30, 2009Ruchira Paul has a post up, "Religious, superstitious, nonsense" and other harsh words. The point at issue is the fact that a teacher who expressed anti-Creationist views in harsh tones was sued. Ruchira asks somewhat rhetorically as to the sort of things parochial schools say about other religions and atheists. The bigger issue is one of public decorum, and decorum is very contextual. When my 7th grade teacher had us read Medea she explained a bit about the context of Greek society, including the nature of their religion. She spoke of "their gods" and "our God." Her reference to "our God"…
razib | October 30, 2009I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation, but let's assume so for the purposes of reviewing a new paper which has come out and offers a slight but fascinating twist on the grandmother hypothesis. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality:
Biologists use genetic relatedness between family…
gregladen | October 29, 2009Broadly speaking there are two kinds of federally regulated sources for dogs and cats used in medical research, training, an testing, in the US. They are labeled, unambiguously, A and B. A-class sources are breeders that produce animals for use in research. B-class sources, also called "Random source," provide animals, usually adults, that are not bred, but just acquired somehow (more or less randomly?) and kept for a while, and sold to research facilities. Random source dogs and cats are not bred by these dealers. (These are USDA regulatory categories.)
According to a report produced by…
jstemwedel | October 28, 2009In a recent post, I issued an invitation:
I am always up for a dialogue on the issue of our moral relation to animals and on the ethical use of animals in scientific research. If folks inclined towards the animal rights stance want to engage in a dialogue right here, in the comments on this post, I am happy to host it.
(I will not, however, be hosting a debate. A dialogue is different from a debate, and a dialogue is what I'm prepared to host.)
That post has received upward of 250 comments, so there was certainly some sort of exchange going on. But, did we manage to have something…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about psychology, behavior or neurobiology lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published…
emjohnson | October 28, 2009As a species we are consumed by love. Ask yourself, how many cultural productions (films, stories, songs, dances, arts) do not have love, the loss of love or the absence of love as their central theme? Would you be satisfied with what was left over? That fact that love has so much power over us is just one reason why evolutionary research is so fascinating.
A well-worn trope of human culture is mens obsession with female infidelity. Othello. Madame Bovary. Desperate Housewives. These are just three Western examples of this concern that are paralleled in nearly every society throughout…
sa smith | October 27, 2009I dont know if I can think of anyone who gets everything wrong, so consistently.
Okay, sure he gets the Creationism thing wrong. Whatevs.
He also makes unwise financial decisions. Who doesnt, these days?
No, get this, dude cant even pick a charity without fucking up! A charity to help stop puppy mills! HE FUCKS IT UP!
1. The 'rescuers' in this video might support HSUS, but they are not some super-special HSUS anti-puppy-mill swat team (despite the fact they are coated head-to-toe in HSUS paraphernalia, except for one lady in uniform). Those rescuers? Theyre normal animal control…
jjacquet | October 27, 2009Because it is so beautifully concocted, it is tempting to digest every last drop of Mark Slouka's delicious potion ("Dehumanized" published last month in Harper's) without questioning the recipe. That Slouka pits capitalism (or, to be more specific, the puerile, corporate-driven aspects of capitalism) against citizenry was a well articulated but obvious face-off. More subtle (and noxious in its subtlety) was the claim that somehow math and science better equip students for lives as capitalist droids. Here's Slouka:
It troubles me because there are many things "math and science" do well,…
cortex | October 27, 2009Natalie Angiers profiles dopamine, which isn't just about rewards:
In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don't watch out, you'll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine?
Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading, just as was the previous caricature of serotonin as a neural happy face.
In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Would you like to share your excellent writing about science, nature or medicine with the world? Now you can! There is a blog carnival that celebrates the best writing in the blogosphere about these topics and we are seeking submissions from you, the reading and writing public that you think are suitable for this blog carnival.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published recently. This edition is entitled Scientia Pro Publica -- 14th edition…
drorzel | October 26, 2009
Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt - NYTimes.com
"Agincourt's status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history -- and a keystone of the English self-image -- has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers. "
(tags: history humanities war)
Swans on Tea » It ... Moves
Boom de yada, boom de yada.
(tags: video silly swans-on-tea xkcd comics)
What the crappy…