razib | May 13, 2009Physics, Tolkien, and the Bomb
Obesity - A new study and what it means to be a "healthy weight"
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The Social Ramifications of Volcanism
Why don't we finish the human genome first?
razib | May 13, 2009
When I found out a while back that Jonah Lehrer's next book was titled How We Decide, I knew I was going to check it out. It's no coincidence that I recently reviewed Predictably Irrational, I blog because I'm interested in reducing the human animal down its basic units of organization. Due to my disciplinary focus I generally touch upon behavior genetics or the inferences of human history one can glean from evolutionary genetics. History, psychology and economics are all domains which have piqued my interest. But I'll be honest and admit that I tend to avoid neuroscience because there's a…
razib | May 13, 2009Via Marginal Revolution, Has Overweight Become the New Normal? Evidence of a Generational Shift in Body Weight Norms:
We test for differences across the two most recent NHANES survey periods (1988-1994 and 1999-2004) in self-perception of weight status. We find that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling for objective weight status and other factors. Among women, the decline in the tendency to self-classify as overweight is concentrated in the 17-35 age range, and, within this range, is…
razib | May 12, 2009You can watch the new Frontline documentary on Bernie's fraud online. If you're a Madoff-junkie, like I am, absolutely nothing new in terms of substance. But, it is really striking how much Fairfield Greenwich was run by total bullshit artists.
razib | May 12, 2009Analysis of genomic diversity in Mexican Mestizo populations to develop genomic medicine in Mexico:
Mexico is developing the basis for genomic medicine to improve healthcare of its population. The extensive study of genetic diversity and linkage disequilibrium structure of different populations has made it possible to develop tagging and imputation strategies to comprehensively analyze common genetic variation in association studies of complex diseases. We assessed the benefit of a Mexican haplotype map to improve identification of genes related to common diseases in the Mexican population.…
razib | May 11, 2009I went and watched the new Star Trek movie this weekend. It was alright. Worth the money. But there's one thing that's been getting in my craw about criticisms about the film, so I thought I would air my dissent. Since it's a spoiler, below the fold....
I liked the fact that the time travelers broke temporal continuity and that we're now veering off into an alternative timeline. Time travel was cute when Harlan Ellison came up with it in the 1960s, but it's done, overused and stale. In fact I began to feel years ago that it was a get-out-of-jail card whenever writers didn't have any new…
razib | May 11, 2009You might have already see this chart relating obesity to time spent eating in The New York Times:
The commentary accompanying the chart goes like so:
On Monday, in posting some of the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Society at a Glance report, I noted that the French spent the most time per day eating, but had one of the lowest obesity rates among developed nations.
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Jim Manzi dug deeper into the data and found something very interesting:
I recreated the original analysis (minus the inclusion of the OECD average as a data…
razib | May 11, 2009That seems the finding of this paper, Familial Aggregation of Survival and Late Female Reproduction:
Women giving birth at advanced reproductive ages in natural fertility conditions have been shown to have superior postmenopausal longevity. It is unknown whether improved survival is more likely among relatives of late-fertile women. This study compares survival past age 50 of men with and without a late-fertile sister in two populations: Utahns born in 1800-1869 identified from the Utah Population Database and Québec residents born in 1670-1750 identified from the Programme de recherche en…
razib | May 11, 2009Dienekes reports on an abstracts for paper presentations at the ESHG 2009. This was is particularly interesting:
European Lactase Persistence Allele is Associated With Increase in Body Mass Index
J. A. Kettunen et al.
The global prevalence of obesity, usually indexed by body mass index (BMI) cut-offs, has increased significantly in the recent decades, mainly due to positive energy balance. However, the impact of a selection for specific genes cannot be excluded. Here we have tested the association between BMI and one of the best known genetic variants showing strong selective pressure: the…
razib | May 10, 2009A few months ago I relayed preliminary data which suggested that Estonians are not like Finns. Now a new paper, Genetic Structure of Europeans: A View from the North-East:
Using principal component (PC) analysis, we studied the genetic constitution of 3,112 individuals from Europe as portrayed by more than 270,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped with the Illumina Infinium platform. In cohorts where the sample size was >100, one hundred randomly chosen samples were used for analysis to minimize the sample size effect, resulting in a total of 1,564 samples. This analysis…
razib | May 8, 2009I've been away from the computer a fair amount the past few days. In any case, my RSS is saturated with posts about this new Star Trek movie, which I haven't seen. Either it must be good, or I read the blogs of other nerds. Or, perhaps both.
razib | May 7, 2009Thabet points me to a new survey of Muslims and the European public. The focus is especially on the UK, France and Germany. In short Muslims in these three nations are more "conservative" than the general population when it comes to social values, but, it is interesting to note that there seems to be an effect of the host culture on the Muslims (i.e., French Muslims track the French, and so forth). But I want to highlight the extreme social conservatism of British Muslims. For example, apparently no British Muslims in the survey thought that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. The…
razib | May 6, 2009There are two posts on ScienceBlogs which highlight two perspectives on the Dinosaur mass extinction, What Wiped Out The Dinosaurs? and K-T extinction debates: cranky "skeptics" or reasonable science?. I'd assumed that the Asteroids-from-the-sky was the clear consensus, but please see this old BloggingHeads.TV clip where Peter Ward seems to imply that the waters are muddier than you'd think:
razib | May 6, 2009Dr. Deb has posted a map which illustrates:
The county-by-county map above shows the percentages of residents who reported "Frequent Mental Distress" (FMD)--defined as 14 or more days of emotional discomfort, including "stress, depression and problems with emotion," during the previous month. Of note, Kentucky was the "saddest" state while Hawaii was the "gladdest".
And the map:
Strine, T. (2004). Risk behaviors and healthcare coverage among adults by frequent mental distress status, 2001 American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 26 (3), 213-216 DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2003.11.002
razib | May 6, 2009With the whole controversy around Michael Savage being blocked from entering England because of his inflammatory comments I thought I would look at attitudes toward speech. One thing I've noticed is that Americans tend to be less instrumental when it comes to matters of speech; that is, speech is not justified as a means, as opposed to being a basic liberal right. In contrast in most other parts of the world people seem more likely to justify the right to speech as a utility in the service of some other end. This difference results in a variance in the way people approach offensive and…
razib | May 6, 2009The universal grammar of birdsong is genetically encoded
The Physics of Rapunzel
Cognitive Control Is Improved By Taking A Step Back - Literally
Maccarone and cheese Einstein!
Why Swine Flu Is Resistant to Adamantane Drugs
razib | May 5, 2009In the comments below on the post on human population structure there was some request for a bigger global perspective. Below the fold I've placed a table with FST values which compare each population to the other. This an older population genetic statistic derived from the work of Sewall Wright, but you are almost certainly familiar with the talking point that "85% of variation is within races, and only 15% between." That is an FST insight. The higher the FST the greater the proportion of genetic variation which can be attributed to between population differences, so it serves as a rough…
razib | May 4, 2009In Nature, De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch:
Culture is typically viewed as consisting of traits inherited epigenetically, through social learning. However, cultural diversity has species-typical constraints, presumably of genetic origin... Zebra finch isolates, unexposed to singing males during development, produce song with characteristics that differ from the wild-type song found in laboratory11 or natural colonies. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations in two social environments…