razib | January 15, 2010The Price of Casino-Like Finance Is Higher Than We Think:
However, Maxine suspects that the longest term and most severe damage from the finance casino will not be from government deficits required to shore up too-big-to-fail banks and insurers. It will be from two powerful, long-standing price distortions that have distorted the composition of our labor force and the mix of human capital within it. The first distortion is the past diversion of some our best technical and mathematical minds away from physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and, yes, even economics, to financial modeling,…
razib | January 14, 2010Raising Kids May Lower Blood Pressure:
A new Brigham Young University study found that parenthood is associated with lower blood pressure, particularly so among women.
...
The study involved 198 adults who wore portable blood pressure monitors, mostly concealed by their clothes, for 24 hours.
The monitors took measurements at random intervals throughout the day -- even while participants slept. This method provides a better sense of a person's true day-to-day blood pressure. Readings taken in a lab can be inflated by people who get the jitters in clinical settings. It's a real phenomenon…
razib | January 13, 2010The changing height of Homo erectus:
Today, I think it's fair to say that the variation of stature in Homo erectus was more or less like the variation within living people. There are short and tall populations today, varied in ecology and latitude. The average stature of young men in the Netherlands today is 184 cm. Adult women in the Philippines average only 150 cm. So the best way to compare statures is to illustrate the range.
That being said, I don't think we know how stature has evolved over time. We do have some data points -- the Neandertals were shorter than Upper Paleolithic…
razib | January 12, 2010A week ago I pointed out that in some visualizations of world wide population variation South Asians & mestizos seem to overlap which each other to a great extent. The reason for this is that both populations can be modeled as admixtures between two separate, but related, populations. Mestizos are the products of pairings between Europeans and indigenous America populations, while South Asians seem to be a stabilized hybrid population which emerged from the fusion of a West Eurasian (closely related to European) and East Eurasian (distantly related to East Asians) populations. The East…
razib | January 12, 2010This sounds entirely plausible to me, On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life:
I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because that's where my business lives. That's how I run a complicated network of collaborators, make hundreds of decisions every day and organise the various sites that made me $14.000 in december.
I can see Google Wave as useful for project management. But for non-professional contexts I guess I like chopping up functionality a bit…
razib | January 12, 2010Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals:
Two sites of the Neandertal-associated Middle Paleolithic of Iberia, dated to as early as approximately 50,000 years ago, yielded perforated and pigment-stained marine shells. At Cueva de los Aviones, three umbo-perforated valves of Acanthocardia and Glycymeris were found alongside lumps of yellow and red colorants, and residues preserved inside a Spondylus shell consist of a red lepidocrocite base mixed with ground, dark red-to-black fragments of hematite and pyrite. A perforated Pecten shell, painted on its external…
razib | January 12, 2010Interesting new ScienceBlog, Oscillator. From the about page:
A collection of notes, thoughts, and news about synthetic biology and biologically inspired engineering in principle and in practice.
razib | January 11, 2010Tracking footprints of artificial selection in the dog genome:
The size, shape, and behavior of the modern domesticated dog has been sculpted by artificial selection for at least 14,000 years. The genetic substrates of selective breeding, however, remain largely unknown. Here, we describe a genome-wide scan for selection in 275 dogs from 10 phenotypically diverse breeds that were genotyped for over 21,000 autosomal SNPs. We identified 155 genomic regions that possess strong signatures of recent selection and contain candidate genes for phenotypes that vary most conspicuously among breeds,…
razib | January 11, 2010Eric Michael Johnson has put up a three part series on deconstructing the intellectual tradition of Social Darwinism. This is blogging as scholarship at its best. When it comes to intellectual history it is often rather easy to quote a particular passage or emphasize one aspect of a movement, and then leverage that in the furtherance of your argument. From what I can gather Eric seems to present "Social Darwinism" as a sloppy and incoherent set of ideas, more often attaining coherency in the reformulations of its antagonists than in consistency of vision set forth by its presumed luminaries.…
razib | January 10, 2010I hadn't logged into my Google Wave account for about a month. No one seems to be using it. But I checked it out the other day, and it seems someone finally contacted me last week...turns out it was an "old friend" who I've been ignoring because of his anti-social personality disorder (blocked him from my regular Gmail account). Thanks Google Wave for helping me reconnect with people who I've been trying to avoid!
razib | January 10, 2010Check it out. Claims he'll do it weekly. More power to him, I feel a bit overwhelmed by all the social media stuff at this point (I'm sure I'm not alone), so anyone who is willing to human-filter the data gets my support.
razib | January 10, 2010The New Republic has published a review of the book The Invention of the Jewish People. There is a genetic aspect to the story:
But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most disgraceful pages in Sand's book are those in which he displays an ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of its most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva…
razib | January 10, 2010Weird but fun list, SNPedia's Top 10 SNPs of the Year:
SNPedia now contains nearly 10,000 SNPs and to welcome 2010 we'd like to highlight at least 10. These SNPs have been selected based on an elusive and ultimately subjective combination of medical importance, statistical believability, and overall general interest. This isn't objective science though, so feel free to comment about why your favorite SNPs should have made the list.
H/T Eye on DNA.
razib | January 7, 2010Update: Must read post from p-ter.
A Composite of Multiple Signals Distinguishes Causal Variants in Regions of Positive Selection:
The human genome contains hundreds of regions whose patterns of genetic variation indicate recent positive natural selection, yet for most the underlying gene and the advantageous mutation remain unknown. We developed a method, Composite of Multiple Signals (CMS), that combines tests for multiple signals of selection and increases resolution by up to 100-fold. Applying CMS to candidate regions from the International Haplotype Map, we localized population-specific…
razib | January 7, 2010In the aughts the elucidation of human pigmentation genetics was of one the major successes of 'omic' techniques. The fact that humans exhibit some continuous variation in complexion was strongly suggestive that more than one gene was at work to generate the range of the phenotype. On the other hand pedigree based studies going back to the 1960s suggested that only a modest number of large effect genetic variants were producing the variance. Today we can say with reasonable certainty that about half a dozen genes account for almost all the between population variation in pigmentation. For…
razib | January 6, 2010I got interested in vitamin D a few years ago because I was trying to figure out a plausible explanation for why many of the genetic variants implicated in lighter skin seem to have risen in frequency relatively recently, 10,000 years ago, when modern humans have been extant at higher latitudes on the order of 30,000 years. So I started mooting the speculative idea that the switch to agriculture might have reduced vitamin D levels. Initially I assumed that rickets was the main issue, but over the past few years there has been a veritable explosion in the medical literature pointing to…
razib | January 6, 2010Last month I pointed to two papers on China genetics. Rereading a bit more closely, I stumbled upon a very curious PC plot. It shows the relationship of various continental populations on the first two principal components of variation genetically. Look at how Mexican Americans from Los Angeles compare to Gujarati Americans from Houston:
In world wide context South Asians and mestizos can be viewed as somewhat analogous; a stable admixture between West and East Eurasian elements. Of course, the "East Eurasian" ancestry of mestizos consists of the New World descendants of Paleolithic…
razib | January 6, 2010The Accuracy of Stated Energy Contents of Reduced-Energy, Commercially Prepared Foods:
The accuracy of stated energy contents of reduced-energy restaurant foods and frozen meals purchased from supermarkets was evaluated. Measured energy values of 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods averaged 18% more than stated values, and measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated. These differences substantially exceeded laboratory measurement error but did not achieve statistical significance due to considerable variability in the…