razib | April 8, 2009Women May Be Sniffing Out Biologically-relevant Information From Underarm Sweat:
Sniffed alone, the underarm odors smelled equally strong to men and women. When fragrance was introduced, only two of 32 scents successfully blocked underarm odor when women were doing the smelling; in contrast, 19 fragrances significantly reduced the strength of underarm odor for men.
...
Not only were women better smellers the men, but male odors were harder to block than female odors. Even though underarm odors from the two sexes didn't differ in how strong they smelled, only
So women have a better sense of…
razib | April 8, 2009David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…
razib | April 8, 2009I only know about Phenylketonuria (PKU) because it is an elementary example of an autosomal recessive disease. Newborns are routinely tested, because those with PKU may develop mental retardation on a normal diet. That's about all I knew, but this from Wikipedia:
If PKU is diagnosed early enough, an affected newborn can grow up with normal brain development, but only by eating a special diet low in phenylalanine for the rest of his or her life. This requires severely restricting or eliminating foods high in phenylalanine, such as meat, chicken, fish, nuts, cheese, legumes and other dairy…
razib | April 7, 2009A Tale of Two Depressions:
Conclusion:
To summarise: the world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30.
The good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different. The question now is whether that policy response will work. For the answer, stay tuned for our next column.
Click through for some real scary charts.
razib | April 6, 2009Interesting article about the difficulties of Indian bachelors who reside in the United States finding wives in India, Ineligible Bachelors: Indian Men Living in U.S. Strike Out Brides and Parents Back Home Get Picky as Economy Makes America Look Risky. Much of the article is about plain economics:
Indian parents used to think it a plus to marry off their daughters to Indian men living in wealthier countries, including the U.S. and Britain. But as India has grown more affluent in recent years, the demand for overseas Indian grooms has been fading. While India's economy is also slowing down,…
razib | April 3, 2009I watched Clockwork Orange a few months ago. More recently I've been reading some economic history, as well as the utopian visions of early 19th century reformers. From these two vantage points I've come to the conclusion that the whole genre of "dystopia" is really about lowered expectations. Modern Western man after the Great Divergence actually lives in what would be a utopia to anyone in the 19th century; after all obesity related illnesses are a major problem for the underclasses in Western societies! Future dystopias in reality simply resemble the social structure and quality of…
razib | April 3, 2009Talk Islam points to a controversy over a comment that the Muslim chaplain made in regards to apostasy on a listserv. First he outlines the dominant legal position with Islam today & historically in regards to apostasy:
There are a few places on the Net where one can find informed discussions of this issue (Search ["Abdul Hakim Murad"|Faraz Rabbani" AND "apostasy"]) . The preponderant position in all of the 4 sunni madhahib (and apparently others of the remaining eight according to one contemporary `alim) is that the verdict is capital punishment.
Of concern for us is that this can only…
razib | April 3, 2009A new paper on the genetics of height, Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Scans for Human Adult Stature Identifies Novel Loci and Associations with Measures of Skeletal Frame Size:
Recent genome-wide (GW) scans have identified several independent loci affecting human stature, but their contribution through the different skeletal components of height is still poorly understood. We carried out a genome-wide scan in 12,611 participants, followed by replication in an additional 7,187 individuals, and identified 17 genomic regions with GW-significant association with height. Of these, two are entirely…
razib | April 1, 2009Peter Suderman asks, Is Robert Heinlein Our Best Pulp Novelist? I suppose this hinges on what you mean by "best," but it seems like Heinlein is probably at the front of any list. Form Isaac Asimov's memoir in regards to Heinlein:
...From the moment his first story appeared, an awed science fiction world accepted him as the best science fiction writer in existence, and he held that post throughout his life. Certainly, I was impressed. I was among the very first to write letters of praise for him to the magazines.
razib | April 1, 2009Richard Dawkins: 'There is something illogical about the fear of death':
The comfort of a dying soldier, the succour for a grieving mother or belief in the after-life of a widower - is it still possible to see the utility of certain psychological aspects in some religious beliefs or customs? [Interviewer - R]
I do see a psychological value, if it does have a real value. I would not wish to be the person who destroys that person's psychological succour. I would not compromise with my public speaking out in the public forum and writing. But if I was visiting someone who was recently bereaved, I…
razib | April 1, 2009Check out the introductory post. I had thought Felix was a more traditional financial journalist, but looks like he took a rather unorthodox route. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
razib | March 31, 2009Estimating the number of unseen variants in the human genome:
...Consistent with previous descriptions, our results show that the African population is the most diverse in terms of the number of variants expected to exist, the Asian populations the least diverse, with the European population in-between. In addition, our results show a clear distinction between the Chinese and the Japanese populations, with the Japanese population being the less diverse. To find all common variants (frequency at least 1%) the number of individuals that need to be sequenced is small (â¼350) and does not differ…
razib | March 31, 2009Dan MacArthur has a post up where he discusses 23andMe's outreach to "mommy bloggers." This makes economic sense for any firm in this field. There's only so much money to be made out of telling blue eyed nerds that they carry the gene for blue eyes. To use a computer analogy the way you can get the Apple II of personal genomics would be to convince millions of pregnant women of the utility of your tools.
razib | March 30, 2009A follow up to my earlier post on information technology, In The Age Of Facebook, Researcher Plumbs Shifting Online Relationships:
"You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30 or 40 or 50,' " said Baym. "But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn't otherwise have. Because we do tend to cluster in relationships with strong ties to people that are pretty similar to ourselves. So they don't necessarily know a whole lot that we don't know. They haven't…
razib | March 30, 2009In the wake of last week's paper, looks like another one is coming down the pipe, Hundreds of Natural-Selection Studies Could be Wrong, Study Demonstrates:
"These statistical methods have led many scientists to believe that natural selection acted on many more genes in humans than it did in chimpanzees, and they conclude that this is the reason why humans have developed large brains and other morphological differences," said Nei. "But I believe that these scientists are wrong. The number of genes that have undergone selection should be nearly the same in humans and chimps. The differences…
razib | March 30, 2009A few years ago a paper came out, How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity?:
Evolutionary theory predicts that males will provide less parental investment for putative offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring. Crossâculturally, paternity confidence (a man's assessment of the likelihood that he is the father of a putative child) is positively associated with men's involvement with children and with investment or inheritance from paternal kin. A survey of 67 studies reporting nonpaternity suggests that for men with high paternity confidence rates of nonpaternity…
razib | March 30, 2009Single Gene Shapes the Toil of Ants' Fighter and Forager Castes:
Researchers studying the social behavior of ants have found that a single gene underlies both the aggressive behavior of the ant colony's soldiers and the food gathering behavior of its foraging caste.
The gene is active in soldier ants, particularly in five neurons in the front of their brain, where it generates large amounts of its product, a protein known as PKG. The exact amount of the protein in the ants' brains is critical to their behavior.
The article goes on talk to about correlates of PKG variation in humans....
razib | March 30, 2009The paper is pretty straightforward, Copy number variation in African Americans:
Employing a SNP platform with greater than 500,000 SNPs, a first-generation CNV map of the African American genome was generated using DNA from 385 healthy African American individuals, and compared to a sample of 435 healthy White individuals. A total of 1362 CNVs were identified within African Americans, which included two CNV regions that were significantly different in frequency between African Americans and Whites (17q21 and 15q11). In addition, a duplication was identified in 74% of DNAs derived from cell…
razib | March 29, 2009Portfolio & Wired have a one-two punch on the future of broadband up. I've read that it takes 3-4 months for a salary increase to be "discounted" so that individuals move up the consumption ladder and no longer feel flush. With internet speed the latency seems far more attenuated; there's always a new application around the corner. The Portfolio piece notes:
Spurred by a new wave of Skype-linked families, Hulu-watching flash mobs, and HD-video downloaders, global internet traffic is likely to quadruple by 2012. That's an internet 75 times larger than it was just five years ago. It will…