razib | June 24, 2009Mark Gimein defends Google Books over at The Big Money. New technology can be misused, but in general I tend to agree with Gimein. Along with Amazon's Search Inside feature Google Books is an excellent resource to look up and cross-reference obscure facts and data. With the utilization of Google Translate you can even get a good sense of some books in languages you don't know (I generally use this to make sure I understand the legend for a table or figure).
razib | June 24, 2009Geoscience enrollments up; supply lags demand
Brazilian Megafauna: hard to hunt or to chew?
What's wrong with Steve Jobs, revisited
Dinosaurs provide clues about the shrunken genomes of birds
Influenza season, part 2
razib | June 24, 2009Related to yesterday's post,The neural bases of empathic accuracy:
Theories of empathy suggest that an accurate understanding of another's emotions should depend on affective, motor, and/or higher cognitive brain regions, but until recently no experimental method has been available to directly test these possibilities. Here, we present a functional imaging paradigm that allowed us to address this issue. We found that empathically accurate, as compared with inaccurate, judgments depended on (i) structures within the human mirror neuron system thought to be involved in shared sensorimotor…
razib | June 23, 2009Obesity May Have Offered Edge Over TB:
Over the course of human evolution, people with excess stores of fat have been more likely to survive famines, many scientists believe, living on to pass their genes to the next generation.
But these days, obesity is thought to be harmful, leading to chronic inflammation and metabolic disorders that set the stage for heart disease. So what went awry? When did excess fat stop being a protective mechanism that assured survival and instead become a liability?
A provocative new hypothesis suggests that in some people, fat not only stores energy but also revs…
razib | June 23, 2009Social Competition May Be Reason For Bigger Brain:
"Our findings suggest brain size increases the most in areas with larger populations and this almost certainly increased the intensity of social competition," said David Geary, Curator's Professor and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Psychosocial Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "When humans had to compete for necessities and social status, which allowed better access to these necessities, bigger brains provided an advantage."
The researchers also found some credibility to the climate-change hypothesis, which assumes that global…
razib | June 22, 2009Why are most genetic associations found through candidate gene studies wrong?
What Darwin Said - Part 2: Mechanisms of Evolution.
razib | June 22, 2009So claims a researcher whose work will be published in the Journal of Zoology, Dinosaurs shed a few tons in science makeover:
"We have found that the statistical model is seriously flawed and the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed."
The research does not suggest that dinosaurs were shorter in length or height. These dimensions are clear from the size of their bones. Instead, Packard's work challenges the depiction of many giant herbivores. Until now they have been shown as well-rounded, powerful animals, when they are more likely to have been…
razib | June 21, 2009
Over the past week the political events in Iran have saturated the news. But the reality is that Pakistan still has an enormous refugee problem, right next door to Iran in fact. It's striking though that there is little news coverage of this at this moment, at the same time that the public and media's imagination has been captured by the shocking death of Neda Soltai, the young Iranian woman whose death was caught on video.
Below the fold are the number of tweets on #neda vs. #pakistan (currently the #pakistan hash-tag is concerned with a cricket win by their national team).
You can look a…
razib | June 21, 2009
A few weeks ago I commented on Richard Wrangham's discussion with Robert Wright. Though most of the conversation was given over to the arguments in Wrangham's latest book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, I focused on the older Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. One of the main reasons is that the latter was a book I had read. A few days ago I managed to get through Catching Fire. Though the content wasn't particularly surprising or novel, Wrangham has been articulating the general model for years, the details were of interest and at ~200 pages it was a quick…
razib | June 20, 2009Due to the nature of following current international events I've been checking out YouTube more than I usually do, and one thing led to another and I ended up on a video of prayer services at a Zoroastrian temple in Yazd. Watching the prayers (go to 1:30) I was struck by how Muslim they seemed to me. I have read that Muslim prayer 5 times a day was in part an attempt to one up the Zoroastrians, who pray 3 times a day. In any case, I decided to see what a Coptic prayer was like, Coptic being the ritual language of the Christians of Egypt. I don't know if the Coptic prayer was in Coptic or…
razib | June 20, 2009Netherlands: Caught in World Wide Web:
Two men who robbed a 14-year-old of cash and a cellphone in September were arrested after the victim spotted them in a photo on Google Maps, the Dutch police said Friday. The victim contacted investigators in Groningen in March after he found a photograph in the mapping site's Street View function showing him and his assailants moments before the robbery. "As the faces were unrecognizable, police made contact with Google in the United States and received the original photograph by mail in June," a police statement said. "An investigator immediately…
razib | June 19, 2009
Regular readers know that hot sauce and chili peppers are important to me. Currently I've taken to using dried habaneros instead of hot sauces, powders or fresh peppers. The last taste the best, but they don't always keep, and sauces are a mess. As for powders, there's always the problem of inhalation. In any case, from The American Journal of Botany, Genetic diversity and structure in semiwild and domesticated chiles (Capsicum annuum; Solanaceae) from Mexico:
The chile of Mesoamerica, Capsicum annuum, is one of five domesticated chiles in the Americas. Among the chiles, it varies the most…
razib | June 18, 2009My friend Joel Grus has a book out which some readers might be interested in, Your Religion Is False. You can get it on Amazon. FYI, Joel is responsible for the banner on this weblog, which he cooked up in an hour in the spring of 2002.
razib | June 18, 200920 years ago Jeffrey Schwartz published The Red Ape, making the case that humanity's closest extant relatives within the animal kingdom were orangutans, not chimpanzees. This was contemporaneous with the media hullabaloo around African Eve, so either you could say that Schwartz's timing was perfect, or it was disastrous. Certainly he was swimming against the spirit of the age, and I recall assuming that The Red Ape was a piece of crankery when I first heard about it, its thesis was so outrageous. But historically the idea that humanity descends from Asian apes is less anomalous, and many…
razib | June 17, 2009Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?:
Instead, he suggests, a core exercise program should emphasize all of the major muscles that girdle the spine, including but not concentrating on the abs. Side plank (lie on your side and raise your upper body) and the "bird dog" (in which, from all fours, you raise an alternate arm and leg) exercise the important muscles embedded along the back and sides of the core. As for the abdominals, no sit-ups, McGill said; they place devastating loads on the disks. An approved crunch begins with you lying down, one knee bent, and hands positioned beneath your…
razib | June 17, 2009Common problem with loci presumed to have psychological or behavioral effects, Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted:
The original finding, published in 2003, created a sensation among scientists and the public because it offered the first specific, plausible explanation of why some people bounce back after a stressful life event while others plunge into lasting despair.
The new report, by several of the most prominent researchers in the field, does not imply that interactions between genes and life experience are trivial; they are almost certainly fundamental, experts agree.
...
Since…
razib | June 17, 2009The End of the Line: a must see
Non-rational lines, empathy, and animal research
Mt. Saint Helens: Supervolcano?
Francis Collins "upbeat" about impact of common disease genetics
The NAS and Geoengineering
razib | June 16, 2009Must see Frontline documentary on the circumstances and aftermath of the Bank of American & Merrill Lynch merger.
razib | June 16, 2009Darwin Killed Off The Werewolf:
From the late 19th century onwards, stories of werewolf encounters tailed away significantly, says Regal. "The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view," he says. "The ape-human hybrid, however, is not only evolutionarily acceptable, it is the basis of human evolution."
Today, in Darwin's bicentenary year, werewolves have been relegated to films. When it comes to the actual monster scene, it's Bigfoot that now dominates.
This is an interesting thesis. In light of…