evolgen | March 22, 2006Take a look at the unfortunate name NASA has given to its small satellites used to study the earth's magnetic fields:
evolgen | March 21, 2006The Specter-Harkin Amendment passed the Senate, but this does not guarantee an increase to the NIH budged. The House must still vote on it and it must be reflected in House and Senate Appropriations Committees' allocation for the Labor-Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee. (Don't worry, I don't understand the jargon either; I'm reproducing it from an email I received from the Genetics Society of America.)
That said, an important step has been taken towards ensuring important biomedical research gets funded. The amendment passed by a vote of 73 to 27. I have reproduced a list…
evolgen | March 20, 2006Japan has jumped out to an early lead over Cuba in the World Baseball Classic championship game. Why do I mention this? Not only have Japanese researchers made great contributions to evolutionary genetics, but the emperor of Japan has actually actively studied evolutionary biology. Also, the Japanese left fielder, Hitoshi Tamura, happens to share his name with the fairly prominent scientist, Koichiro Tamura. Every time I hear them refer to Tamura, I think about the Tamura-Nei distance correction.
evolgen | March 20, 2006Robert Skipper took issue with Dick Lewontin's definition of natural selection. Skipper did not like how Lewontin removed the struggle for existence and interaction with the environment from the requirements for evolution by natural selection. John Hawks points out that the environment encompasses everything outside of the genome (the proteome, cell environment, extracellular physiology, the extra-organismal environment, and even culture), and I agree with him -- as a reductionist, I like to view the nucleotide as the unit of selection and everything else as the environment. Skipper agrees…
evolgen | March 20, 2006
Rounds one and two are over, and the rubble has settled. The fakers have been exposed, and the Cinderfellas have emerged. So, how good are the ScienceBloggers at picking college basketball games? Kevin Vranes (I think) is currently sitting in first place, but two of his final four teams (Kansas and North Carolina) have already been knocked out. I'm in a tie for third with Ed Brayton (I think) and two other folks whose identity I cannot discern. I managed to get 11 of the 16 teams remaining correct and all of my final four teams (Duke, UCLA, UConn, and Boston College) are still alive,…
evolgen | March 19, 2006The human Y, that is. The Science Creative Quarterly has a very thorough (ie, make sure you have some time to spare) review of the mammalian Y chromosome (focusing on the human Y). The article covers the origin and evolution of the mammalian Y and what the degeneration of the Y means for the future of human male fertility and sex determination. I should point out that the mammalian Y chromosome is an anomaly in origin and sex determination. In fact, every single sex determination system and sex chromosome system that I know of differs from all of the others in some manner. It looks like…
evolgen | March 17, 2006PLoS Computational Biology has an article in the pipeline on detecting natural selection in humans in chimps. The authors looked for genes evolving at unequal rates between the two species and genes with signals of positive selection. I have not read the entire article, but it looks like a good attempt to distinguish actual positive selection from changes in selective constraint.
evolgen | March 17, 2006Today marks the anniversary of the death of St. Patrick -- the dude who ridded Ireland of its non-existent snakes (some folks claim it was a metaphor for pagans). In honor of this great feat, people around the world drink green beer and pretend to be Irish. What does that have to do with double entendres? Absolutely nothing, but it's my excuse for the following lame joke:
Two transcription factors are hanging out. One says to the other, "Did you end up scoring with that cis regulatory region you were macking on last night?" The other replies, "Yeah, I gave her the old zinc finger."
evolgen | March 16, 2006Seven year old Autum Ashante read a poem she had written to middle- and high-school students in Peekskill, NY.
"Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse," the aspiring actress and poet wrote. "They took the gold, the wisdom and all the storytellers. They took the black women, with the black man weak. Made to watch as they changed the paradigm of our village.
"Yeah white nationalism is what put you in bondage."
She claims that she was trying to instill pride in black students and discourage violence. I'm no poetry expert, but I can see how she is encouraging black pride…
evolgen | March 16, 2006Do you want a quick and dirty guide to DNA replication without any of the fancy pictures or cumbersome terminology commonly found in text books? David Ng has published such a guide at The Science Creative Quarterly. It's a good read even if you already know that stuff.
evolgen | March 15, 2006Hey, Myers, two can play at this game. An article in the Journal of Molecular Evolution presents structural and sequence analysis of hemocyanin (an oxygen carrying protein) from the cephalopod, Nautilus pomilius (shown at the left). They also compared the sequence to another cephalopod, Octopus dofleini, and found that the two species diverged approximately 415 million years ago.
Bergmann, S, B Lieb, P Ruth, and J Markl. 2006. The Hemocyanin from a Living Fossil, the Cephalopod Nautilus pompilius: Protein Structure, Gene Organization, and Evolution. J Mol Evol 62: 362-374.
evolgen | March 15, 2006Randy Olson has been taking his film Flock of Dodos around the United States, showing free screenings at a bunch of universities. The list of places he's visited reads like the lyrics to a Johnny Cash song: Kansas City, Boston, New Haven, Houston. . . (if you have more places to add to the list, put them in the comments). But the show has skipped the largest university in one of the big anti-evolution states, Pennsylvania. It would be awesome if they could schedule a visit to Penn State, where there is some interest in evolution. What do I have to do to get a screening in Central…
evolgen | March 15, 2006The Genetics Society of America is requesting that its members contact their Senators to ask them to support an amendment to increase the 2007 NIH budget proposed by President Bush. As it current stands, the proposed 2007 budget is equal to the 2006 budget (without even a correction for inflation). If you would like contact your Senator, you can look up his or her address, phone number, email, and fax number here. I have reproduced the letter from the GSA below the fold.From the Genetics Society of America:
Read below and contact your Senators using the CapWiz connection (see URL below)…
evolgen | March 15, 2006Tangled Bank #49 has been posted at Living the Scientific Life. Go get your science on.
evolgen | March 14, 2006PLoS Biology (the people that brought you the recent paper from Jonathan Pritchard on detecting selection in the human genome and George Zhang's paper on selection on human pseudogenes) has published an editorial on detecting natural selection. It is a good follow up to my series on detecting natural selection using molecular data.
evolgen | March 12, 2006Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has started an NCAA tournament pool for the ScienceBlogs community. If all of those links were confusing, go here to get the details. If you have no idea what the NCAA basketball tournament is, you should definitely participate -- in these types of things, the less you know, the better you do.
evolgen | March 12, 2006Hot on the heels of Chad's project to find the greatest physics experiment ever (see, also, his call for the greatest experiment or discovery in other fields), The Science Creative Quarterly settles the debate the only logical way possible: a single elimination cage match tournament.
evolgen | March 10, 2006I commented a couple of days ago on a news item about a journal article on the evolution of gene expression in primates that had yet to be published. Well, the article has been published, and I've read it (Nature has also published a news and views piece on the study by Rasmus Nielsen). I have a few comments on why this research is unique, what the researchers found, and the implications of this research below the fold.
WHY THIS STUDY IS UNIQUE: This is the first large scale study to examine gene expression in primates using species specific probes. Gene expression can be measured by…
evolgen | March 10, 2006Today's evolgen Double Entendre Friday deals with the genetic phenomenon known as incomplete penetrance. Ok, maybe this one isn't a double entendre, but more of a pseudo-homonym (can you guess what it sounds like?). When students in an introductory biology course are taught about dominance they learn about recessive and dominant alleles and maybe some special cases (codominance, incomplete dominance, etc). Incomplete penetrance refers to the unpredictability of certain dominance relationships. Take, for example, two alleles of a single gene ('A' and 'a') in which A is dominant to a. We…
evolgen | March 9, 2006Today marks the birthday of our venerable godfather (er, atheist-father?) here at ScienceBlogs, PZ Myers. I am honored and grateful that I have been invited to PZ Myers's . . . birthday . . . on the day of PZ Myers's birthday. And I hope that his first post be a cephalopod post. In appreciation of the blogfather, Grrlscientist is staging a surprise party -- a blogasm of posts -- for Doc Myers. My contribution can be found below the fold. I'm hoping that a list of all of the birthday posts will be compiled at Living the Scientific Life.
Shhh! Quick, hide behind that tree, the Lamarckian…