razib | May 19, 2008OK, the title is deceptive; but the reality is kind of cool in my opinion (you may not share my normative filter; some people prefer the dead). PLOS One is publishing a paper which takes Tasmanian Tiger genetic material, and re-expresses it in vivo in mice! The reasoning for this is pretty straightforward; there are phylogenetic questions which extant lineages can't always answer. With the emergence of the whole field of ancient DNA extraction and sequencing an entirely new avenue of scientific analysis is opening up. This paper cites the work from last year on Neandertal MC1R; if we're…
razib | May 19, 2008Sheril and other science bloggers are talking about the fact that the top 3 in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are female. I suppose that means we'll stop talking about gender disparities in science & engineering? Yeah, I doubt it....
At the same time, this just popped into my RSS, The freedom to say 'no': Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren't interested:
They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her…
razib | May 19, 2008Via E. Klein, I found out abut a new show on PBS this fall, Spain...on the Road Again, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, and Claudia Bassols. Preview below the fold....
I have to admit that Batali's corpulence makes me recall a Sesame Street game...
razib | May 19, 2008I was IMing with a friend about inbreeding depression and came across a map which shows the laws regarding cousin marriage in the United States....
And here's a map of the Mississipi drainage basin....
(nothing else really jumps out at me)
Of course the whole cousin marriage issue isn't as "hot button" as same-sex marriage. I assume cousins who marry in a state where it is legal have their marriage recognized in states where it isn't? It will be interesting if gay marriage becomes much more common if cousin marriage comes up too since it is much more common internationally.
razib | May 17, 2008As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust:
This city has passed a grim demographic milestone: More people are dying here than are being born.
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of entire neighborhoods where the…
razib | May 17, 2008Firefox 3 release candidate goes public:
It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.
...
On the performance front, the documentation states that applications such as Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, compared to Firefox 2, and memory usage has been improved. In addition, bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are less susceptible to data loss.
If you are running Firefox, Help → Check for Updates... Or download. Please note…
razib | May 16, 2008If you don't have a spare computer, want to try out a Linux distribution, and are a little intimidated by the details of setting up a dual-boot, check out Wubi. It makes a dual-boot pretty much a "one-click" affair, loading up the Ubuntu distribution via a Windows installer.
razib | May 15, 2008Since everyone is talking about the fact that the Polar Bear how become a protected species, I thought I'd point to this cool study, Mitochondrial DNA Phylogeography of the North American Brown Bear and Implications for Conservation. Additionally, check out the figure below....
razib | May 15, 2008I know I've posted on this topic before, but I thought I'd revisit it again. You do know that sometimes population bottlenecks can actually result in more variation being freed up for selection? This may strike you as a bit strange; after all, the power of selection to effect phenotypic change is proportional to genetic variance, specifically, additive genetic variance. Population bottlenecks imply a reduction in effective population size, the increase of sample variance across generations, that is, random genetic drift. As population size drops the stochastic change in gene frequencies…
razib | May 14, 2008Many people are talking about David Brooks' new column, The Neural Buddhists. First, I think much respect should be given to Brooks for introducing science into his column; too much punditry today is informed by seat of the pants introspection & anecdote, as opposed to what scholars have uncovered thanks to the funding of the taxpayer. That being said, I think on the specifics there are problems with his interpretation of the literature in the area of neuroscience. Frontal Cortex, Island of Doubt and Evolution Blog have all hit the main points (though I tend to think that Jonah's…
razib | May 13, 2008When I was a child in Bangladesh one of my "charming" activities would be to give the local banana seller some unsolicited advice. As he walked down the street carrying his banana-bunch I would shout down from the balcony and tell him which cultivars my family preferred, and that he better get with the program if he wanted our business. What he had on offer was similar to the Cavendish which you encounter in American supermarkets; my family tended to prefer a smaller, sweeter, variety which was often seeded. Despite all the problems (e.g., pathogen load) associated with living in an…
razib | May 13, 2008Ron Bailey in Reason, The Genetics of Ensoulment:
Advances in stem cell research may be provoking a kind of "God of the Gaps" retreat on the moral status of embryos. People who subscribe to God of the Gaps thinking believe that the hand of God can be seen in those things which science cannot explain. In this case, the closing gaps in the details of molecular biology are forcing pro-lifers into an uncomfortable corner where they have to decide whether or not a cell can be imbued with a soul by turning a single gene on or off.
razib | May 12, 2008Here. The embed is the best bet if you can view it; the download often fails (server has been slammed?). Only a moderate amount of discussion about religion; Dawkins talks a fair bit about an obscure field, evolutionary biology. Well done.
Via Accidental Blogger.
razib | May 12, 2008Another article about cousin marriage in the UK. The issue here is simple; you have a National Health Service which covers everyone, and doctors are noticing that Pakistanis are overrepresented in many cases of recessive diseases. The culprit is probably cousin marriage. Here are two points which are both valid:
'In our local school for deaf children, half the pupils are of Asian origin though Asians only form about 20 per cent of the population,' said Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley. 'I also know of several sets of parents in my constituency who are cousins and whose children are severely…
razib | May 12, 2008Last year p-ter put up a post pointing to useful online tools such as Haplotter. One of the great things about biology today is that so much of the data from genomics is being thrown out there within reach of the plebs. And a lot of value is being added through user interfaces which smooth the connection between you and these databases. So check out NextBio; from the FAQ:
NextBio is a life science search engine that enables researchers and clinicians to access and understand the world's life sciences information. With NextBio, in just one click you can search through tens of thousands of…
razib | May 11, 2008...is live. Don't know what I'm talking about? Natural language search; people have been talking about this as the Next Big Thing for a while.... (though I will say, if people have been talking about something, it isn't likely to be the Next Big Thing)
razib | May 11, 2008Pew has an excellent survey up about the state of religion and religiosity in China. There isn't a lot of good data out of China on this topic for obvious reasons. One of the phenomenon of recent years in the West has been the perception among evangelicals that China is the scene of mass conversions to Christianity. Because of the lack of data there are speculations of hundreds of millions of crypto-Christians; and some in the media repeat these claims rather uncritically (Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power is an example of the…