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My Picks From ScienceDaily

Wild Three-Toed Sloths Sleep 6 Hours Less Per Day Than Captive Sloths, First Electrophysical Recording Shows: In the first experiment to record the electrophysiology of sleep in a wild animal, three-toed sloths carrying miniature electroencephalogram recorders slept 9.63 hours per day--6 hours less than captive sloths did, reports an international team of researchers working on the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Barro Colorado Island in Panama. Educated People In US Living Longer, Less Educated Have Unchanged Death Rate: A new study finds a gap in overall death rates between…

Asbestos victims demand North American ban on use and export of asbestos

[Update 12/15/11 below] It's been 3 1/2 years since Leah Nielsen lost her father from mesothelioma. "I took care of my father as he died an excruciating death. He died too young." This Utah resident wants to protect others from suffering the same kind of horrible death by banning the use and export of asbestos. Pennsylania resident Barbara Mozuch feels the same way: "My mother died on June 18, 2011 from peritoneal mesothelioma, just seven weeks after being diagnosed!! Something needs to be done." Heidi von Palleske of Ontario, Canada explains how asbestos ruined the health and took…

Nine Sacrificial Sites

I'm writing a paper for the conference volume of the Helsinki meeting I attended back in October. Here's an excerpt from the manuscript. In April and May of 2010 I visited nine sacrificial sites in Uppland and Södermanland provinces, selecting them by the criteria that I had to be able to ascertain their locations closely, the finds should preferably be rather rich, and I favoured sites located within walking distance of each other. The winter had been long and cold, and so vegetation was still sparse and much plough soil remained open to field walking. This ensured the best possible…

Viking Farmer's Rest Disturbed by Badgers and Potatoes

Spent the day digging with my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell like so many times before. I like to join them on their sites for a day every now and then (2007, 2008, 2010). The two are mainly known as Mesolithic scholars, but I have been with them on a Neolithic and a Bronze Age site as well on previous occasions. And this time they're straight up my own alley of research: they're digging the largest of the Viking Period burial mounds in Tyresta hamlet's southern cemetery. Measuring eleven meters in diameter and about one-and-a-half in height, it's a pretty imposing structure…

Witt's Dishonest Argument on Tiktaalik roseae

Jonathan Witt, one of the many DI shills, has posted one of the many ID responses to the find of Tiktaalik roseae. The most fascinating thing about the ID response to this find is how scatterbrained it's been. An organization famous for being able to stay "on message" can't seem to settle on a position. Rob Crowther, citing unnamed "Discovery Institute scientists", says that the find isn't a threat to ID at all because ID doesn't deny common descent. But as Nick Matzke points out, Of Pandas and People, which the DI calls the first intelligent design textbook, clearly relies on the lack of "…

The Whole Universe from One Satellite's Eyes

"We were left with a picture of part of the sky with no stars or galaxies, but it still had this infrared glow with giant blobs that we think could be the glow from the very first stars." -John Mather When you look out at the night sky, you're limited by the light pollution from your surroundings, the imperfections of our atmosphere, the light-blocking gas and dust throughout the interstellar and intergalactic medium, and the capabilities of your eyes. Still, what one can see is truly a sight to behold. Image credit: IronRodArt - Royce Blair of NightScapePhotos.com. What if you didn't have…

Claybourn on Martin Luther King

Josh Claybourn has a post up about today being Martin Luther King day. I am very much like him in that I cannot listen to King's "I Have A Dream" speech without getting goosebumps. It is one of the most inspirational speeches you will ever hear (for a realvideo clip, click here), made more so in my view because of his invocation of the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note. My favorite passage is below the fold. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote…

Travel Companion of Linnaeus

I wrote my PhD thesis about the largest prehistoric cemetery on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. The place is named Barshalder and straddles the boundary between Grötlingbo and Fide parishes. The first graves are from the early 1st century AD and the last from about the year 1100. Some continuity! And the site measures two kilometres from one end to the other. One of Gotland's two great barrows is near the middle of its extent, now badly damaged by potato cellars. This barrow enters written history when a famous man passes it in the summer of 1741. The earliest written mentions I…

John Scalzi, The Last Colony [Library of Babel]

You might not have noticed, but John Scalzi has a new book out. The Last Colony is the third book in the Old Man's War series. It's narrated by John Perry from Old Man's War, now happily married to Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades, and working as a colonial administrator on a planet called Huckleberry. At least, that's what they're doing until an old acquaintance from the military turns up to ask them to take over running a new colony, the first to draw its colonists from already established human colonies, rather than third world countries on Earth. Predictably, this creates a somewhat…

XMRV: ITS EVERYWHERE! UUUUUGH! ITS IN MY RACCOON WOUNDS! AND MY QIAGEN COLUMNS!

DNA Extraction Columns Contaminated with Murine Sequences This paper makes me very thankful for two things: 1-- Bossman is extremely neurotic about controls (this apparently, is inheritable, because I am too). 2-- I dont work on a mouse virus. If the list of potential sources of contamination in the XMRV-->prostate cancer, XMRV-->CFS stories werent long enough, here is yet another source of contamination to add to the list: In assessing the prevalence of XMRV in prostate cancer tissue samples we discovered that eluates from naïve DNA purification columns, when subjected to PCR with…

Trout with salmon parents could help to revive endangered fish species

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Getting excited when fish produce sperm would usually get you strange looks. But for Tomoyuki Okutsu and colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, it's all part of a day's work. They are trying to use one species of fish as surrogate parents for another, a technique that could help to preserve species that are headed for extinction. Okutsu works on salmonids, a group of fish that includes salmon and trout. Many members of this tasty clan have suffered greatly from over-…

Evidence for the Bering Strait Theory of Migration into the Americas

Wang et al., publishing in PLoS Genetics, looked at the genetic diversity in Native American populations from Canada all the way down into South America. They wanted to see whether the genetic diversity observed in Native peoples correlated in any way with geography. If the genetic diversity did not correlate with geography this would suggest that Native people colonized the New world from the Old world at different times in different waves of expansion. If, on the other hand, the genetic diversity correlated well with geography (on a North to South axis of decreasing diversity) this would…

Expelled: Now with added anti-Semitism

One of the central themes within Expelled is the equation of Darwinism with Nazism. We are treated to a somber Ben Stein visiting the death camps. Without Darwin they wouldn’t have existed goes the simplistic viewpoint. Yet, before we criticize Stein and the producers of the movie, we must acknowledge that there are scientists - biologists even - who harbor(ed) anti-Semitic views. Witness the following: By their own will, [Jews] prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities. They form their own communes (kahals), they govern themselves by their own rules and…

Book News, Part One

My latest book, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins is now available on Amazon.com, and I think it's getting put on the shelves at bookstores. I've only referred to the book here glancingly from time to time, and I wanted to take a minute now to give Loom readers a sense of the book (and perhaps inspire the sales of a few copies). From the start of this blog, I've dedicated a lot of space to new discoveries about where we came from. I've written about spectacular new fossils, from Sahelanthropus, the oldest known hominid to the Hobbits (a k a Homo floresiensis), which might have been…

Highlights from Experimental Biology- Day 3

Day 3 of the Experimental Biology meeting was arguably one of the most exciting for comparative physiology. Here are the highlights from Monday: Morning Seminars: Birgitte McDonald from Aarhus University, Denmark presented, "Deep-diving sea lions exhibit extreme bradycardia in long-duration dives." Birgitte and Dr. Paul Ponganis measured the heart rate of California sea lions (Z. californianus) using digital electrocardiogram loggers and found that the heart rate was reduced (bradycardia) during dives along with reduced blood flow to the lungs and periphery. This helps preserve the oxygen…

The Friday Fermentable: ScienceBlogs.com Good, Cheap Wine

A back alley conversation among several ScienceBloggers is the impetus for this week's post. A couple of weeks ago, Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily asked all of us about our favorite cheap wine deals. So, with the permission of my SciBlings, I thought I'd let the readership in on the discussion and suggestions: From the Mungers: 1. Jaja de Jau (nice Cotes de Roussillon, with great bite) 2. Goats do Roam (Grenache/Syrah from South Africa) 3. Antica Corte Valpolicella A couple that used to be good but have fallen off in recent years. If you're still drinking these, you can find better: 1…

Repost: Mosasaurs - The Marine Monsters of New Jersey

The skull of Mosasaurus hoffmani. From Lingham-Soliar 1995. On my first trip to the Inversand marl pit in Sewell, New Jersey, I didn't find the wonderfully preserved Dryptosaurus skeleton I had been dreaming of. I picked up a number of Cretaceous bivalve shells and Paleocene sponges, but other than a few scraps of "Chunkosaurus" my excavations didn't yield very much. Before my paleontology class left the site, though, we took a walk by the spoil piles - great green mounds of sediment that had already been mined for glauconite. It had recently rained, and little pillars of the sandy green…

Death rate from handgun, long guns and knife wounds

Peter Proctor wrote: An equivalent wound is ( by definition ) an equivalent wound . Absent LET effects, it doesn't matter much where it came from. Oh, so your statement was a tautology? By "equivalent", you meant of equivalent lethality? Hole, I meant an equivalent hole. Pretty simple concenpt, actually. Surprised I have to explain it so many times... Because it's ambiguous and the meaning you seem to be using is not germane to the discussion. The important question is what the result of substituting knives or long-guns for handguns in shootings and stabbings. Will there bo more…

The Doctors Aren't the Only Ones at Fault

Yesterday, The New York Times reported on the latest prominent medical doctor to be outed for not reporting the vast sums of money he was receiving from drug companies: One of the nation's most influential psychiatrists earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules, according to documents provided to Congressional investigators. The psychiatrist, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, is the most prominent figure to date in a series…

Boyda speaks on Iraq

From the Congressional Record: Mr. REYES. Mr. Speaker, it is now my pleasure to yield 5 minutes to a valued member of the Armed Services Committee, the gentlewoman from Kansas (Mrs. Boyda). Mrs. BOYDA of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss the most critical issue this Congress, indeed our Nation, is facing. The U.S. military is the best fighting force in the world, and it is vitally important that we keep it that way. I am concerned that the President's planned escalation is too little, too late, and it will further deplete our military's readiness. My life changed in the late…

Sex tricks from bacteria and flies

The first lab I worked in was a fruit fly lab. As a budding mammalogist, this wasn't the most optimal environment, but it had its advantages. I learned to work with flies, and the advantages of model systems. I learned to clean glassware with speed and grace. I learned that science involves a lot of failure. And I learned about Wolbachia (Tim Karr, mentioned in that article, was the lab's head). Carl Zimmer reports some of the tricks that bacterium can play: If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will…

Monsters from New Jersey

The skull of Mosasaurus hoffmani. Lingham-Soliar 1995. On my first trip to the Inversand marl pit in Sewell, New Jersey, I didn't find the wonderfully preserved Dryptosaurus skeleton I had been dreaming of. I come across a number of bivalve shells and geologically younger sponges, but other than a few scraps of "Chunkosaurus," my excavations didn't yield very much. Before my paleontology class left the site, though, we took a walk by the spoil piles, great green mounds of sediment that had already been mined for glauconite. It had recently rained, and little pillars revealed fragmentary…

Invasive Exotic Species: More than Meets the Eye

tags: ecology, exotic species, introduced species, non-native species, invasive species, monk parakeets, quaker parrots, Myiopsitta monachus, Michael A Russello, Michael L Avery, Timothy F Wright Monk (Quaker) parakeets, Myiopsitta monachus, with nest. Image: Arthur Grosset [larger view]. Invasive species are everywhere: from plants such as Scotch (English) broom, Cytisus scoparius, whose yellow flowers bloom prolifically along roadways of North America, Australia and New Zealand to mammals such as human beings, Homo sapiens, which are the ultimate invasive species because we have…

Is history repeating itself?

This is the fifteenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Cassie Klostermann.  One of the major accomplishments that public health professionals pride themselves in is the reduction of people getting sick or dying from preventable infectious diseases. Unfortunately, these debilitating, historic diseases that health professionals had once thought they had under control are starting to rear their ugly heads once again in the United States (U.S.). One of these diseases that I am referring to is measles. Measles is a highly contagious virus (from the genus Morbillivirus) spread through the air…

Monster hunting? Well, no. No.

By naughtily avoiding the long list of things that I'm supposed to be doing in my 'spare' time I've finally done it: adapted my monumental, keynote cryptozoology conference speech into an article(s) for publication here at Tet Zoo. Ok, so it wasn't so 'monumental' or 'keynote', but I thought I might as well recycle it anyway (for more on the conference in question see the article here). The general message here might, by now, be familiar to Tet Zoo regulars, as I've been promoting the same view for a while now... The talk included several hundred words on the discoveries made by Marc van…

What is the Big Bang all about?

"Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star Biggest puzzle from afar How unlike the other ones Brighter than a billion suns Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star How I wonder what you are." -George Gamow The Big Bang is one of the greatest, revolutionary ideas in all of modern science, but it's also one of the most successful ideas as far as making predictions that have aligned with our observations of the Universe. Despite all of that, there are a whole bunch of people who'll read this (and more who won't) who aren't sure that the Big Bang is correct. Some people, in fact, don't even understand the definition of…

The Amazing Phenomenon of Volcanic Lightning!

"Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity." -Joseph Addison One of the most brilliant phenomena found in our atmosphere is that of a lightning strike. Shown below in breathtaking slow-motion, somewhere on the order of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons are exchanged in a single bolt between the clouds and the Earth's surface. Video credit: Tom A. Warner from ZT Research; credit also WeatherVideoHD.TV, and retrieved from Jest.…

Watching Individual Atoms Make a Phase Transition

A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner's group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though-- the article didn't appear in Science last week. It is, however, available on the arxiv, so you get the ResearchBlogging for the free version a few days before you can pay an exorbitant amount to read it in the journal. The title of the paper is "Probing the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition at the Single Atom Level," which is kind of a lot of jargon. The key image is…

Reflecting, Totally; or Why the Pool Looks Shiny from Underwater

The other day, I made a suggestion to one of my research students of an experiment to try. When I checked back a day later, she told me it hadn't worked, and I immediately realized that what I had told her to do was very stupid. As penance, then, I'll explain the underlying physics, which coincidentally has a nice summer-y sort of application alluded to in the post title. If you're the sort of person who enjoys swimming, and can either open your eyes underwater or regularly wear a mask or goggles, you've probably notice that the underside of the surface of a swimming pool or other body of…

Dinosaur proteins, cells and blood vessels recovered from Bracyhlophosaurus

These cells look like fairly typical bone cells. They appear to be connected to each other by thin branch-like projections and are embedded in a white matrix of fibres. At their centres are dark red spots that are probably their nuclei. But it's not their appearance that singles out these extraordinary cells - it's their source. You're looking at the bone cells of a dinosaur. They come from an animal called Brachylophosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur that lived over 80 million years ago. By looking at one of its thigh bones, Mary Schweitzer from North Carolina State University has managed to…

Breaking the Chain: Ardipithecus Is Not A Missing Link

See thro' this air, this ocean, and this earth All matter quick, and bursting into birth: Above, how high progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of being! which from God began; Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, who no eye can see, No glass can reach; from infinite to thee; From thee to nothing.--On superior powers Were we to press, inferior might on ours; Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed: From Nature's chain whatever link you like, Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the…

European man perhaps a Middle Eastern farmer

For the past few decades there has been a long standing debate as to the origins of modern Europeans. The two alternative hypotheses are: * Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago. * Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas. The two extreme positions are not really accepted in such stark forms by anyone. Rather, the debate is over the effect size of #1 vs. #2. Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford, has been arguing for the…

A poll in need of a kick in the pants

In the wake of the recent efforts of a School Administrative District in Maine to expel evolution from the curriculum, we now have a pointless poll seeking the vox populi on this badly worded question: "A school board member in SAD 59 wants the topic of evolution dropped from high school science curriculums. Do you agree?" While I agree that a school board member wants to do that, I think the poll actually intends to ask whether you want evolution dropped from the curriculum.

One New Snow Poll: No to Creationism!

Consider this question from a recent poll: "Should topics such as creationism or intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution?" The correct answer is, of course, no. And the poll results support this: This may not seem remarkable, until you learn where the poll is from. It is from "One New Snow" which is apparently some sort of Christian Yahoo thing: Details here. Click the picture of the poll if you want to vote too.

What Good Math Writing Looks Like

I was really impressed by this post from Polymathematics. He discusses a proof of Morley's Theorem, which is a result from Euclidean geometry. Start with any triangle. Trisect each of the three angles. Then the points of intersection of pairs of adjacent trisectors from the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Take one look at the pictures Polymathematics provides and you'll see what I mean. The details of the proof are ingenious, and not too hard to follow. Highly recommended.

Don't worry, kids, Curry is just making it all up

Lots of people have been sending me this bad article from the Daily Mail, "Human race will 'split into two different species'". I don't quite get it. This is the very same utter nonsense from Oliver Curry that came out at this same time last year. Is this to be a yearly occurrence now? Every Halloween some newspaper will dredge up this bilge from the London School of Economics and try to horrify us with abominable pseudoscience masquerading as evolutionary biology?

An Odd Ant

Proceratium californicum San Mateo Co., California From Antweb: This rarely collected ant is known from valley oak (Quercus lobata) riparian woodland in the Central Valley and from adjacent foothill localities (oak woodland; chaparral; grassland). It is presumed to be a specialist, subterranean predator on spider eggs. Alates have been collected in April and May. photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon D60 f/13, 1/200 sec, ISO 100, twin flash diffused through tracing paper

Second New England RNA Data Club Tonight

We'll be having talks by Hong Cheng from the Reed lab (click here for my summary of her recent paper), Changchun Xiao from the Rajewski lab on miRNAs and B cell differentiation, and Peter Boag from the Blackwell lab on P-bodies and development. The talks will be held in the Cannon Room in building C of the Harvard Medical School quad. They begin at 5:30 and end by about 7:00PM. Food and drinks will follow.

A Little Link Love

Here at DSN we give microbes a dedicated week at other blogs it is all microbes all the time. At the wonderfully titled Small Thing Considered, you should check out both Swimming by the Light of the Sun and Gifts From Above. The site has more credentials and awards than can fit on an office wall. It is the blog for the American Microbiology Society and the writing comes from Moselio Schaechter, distinguished professor and emeritus from Tufts.

Why Do Large Creatures From the Deep Always Attack Japan?

Workers from the Japanese Aquarium captured video of deep-sea shark lurking about the shallows of Awashima Port. The species, Chlamydoselachus anguineus or frilled shark, is not unknown from shallow water but rare. The frilled shark as a global distribution as is found from 0-1570m (5151ft). It can reach 2m (6.5ft) in length and feeds on other sharks, squid and bony fish. Currently it is listed by IUCN as Near-Threatened. More here at fishbase.

Good Math, Bad Math, Literal Math

MarkCC over at Good Math, Bad Math offers up some enjoyable elements from time to time. Between the good and the bad, is there space for humorous literal math? Yes, it's final exam time here at the college and I received the following from a colleague (the exam paper is not from one of his courses): I almost want to give the guy a bonus point for making me laugh (particularly due to the little "etc." scrawl at the bottom).

Tocharians within the last 6,000 years?

From Different Matrilineal Contributions to Genetic Structure of Ethnic Groups in the Silk Road Region in China: Although our samples were from the same geographic location, a decreasing tendency of the western Eurasian-specific haplogroup frequency was observed, with the highest frequency present in Uygur (42.6%) and Uzbek (41.4%) samples, followed by Kazak (30.2%), Mongolian (14.3%), and Hui (6.7%). The paper supports the idea that Uyghurs are an admixed population from Western and Eastern sources. But is this just an ancient cline of allele frequencies? In other words, are Uyghur lineage…

Backtracking Birds Show Islands are not Evolutionary Dead Ends [REPRISE]

tags: evolution, biogeography, ornithology, birds, avian Kolo Sunset. Photo credit: Christopher E. Filardi, American Museum of Natural History (Click on image for a larger picture). Two of my ornithologist colleagues, Chris Filardi and Rob Moyle, published a paper in the top-tier research journal, Nature. This paper is especially exciting because it shows that oceanic islands are not necessarily the evolutionary "dead ends" that they have traditionally been portrayed to be. In fact, Chris and Rob's data show that a group of birds have actually accomplished what scientists had never…

The Growing Evidence of the Threat of Fracking to the Nation’s Groundwater

For some time now, proponents of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” have claimed there was little or no evidence of real risk to groundwater. But as the classic saying goes: “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of a problem. And the evidence that fracking can contaminate groundwater and drinking water wells is growing stronger with every new study. As most people now know, fracking is a method for enhancing the production of natural gas (or oil, or geothermal energy wells). Fracking involves injecting fluids -- typically complex mixes of water and…

Reducing Conflicts and Increasing Transparency: Why so difficult?

 By Susan F. Wood, PhD  Two things appear to be major bones of contention in determining the final version of what is now named the "FDA Revitalization Act of 2007" (FDARA).  And they both related to public transparency and public accountability.  The first is the limitation of financial conflicts of interest by FDA Advisory Committee members.  The House has adopted language that limits  the ability of FDA to grant waivers to members of Advisory Committees (AC) who have financial conflicts to only 1 waiver per meeting of a committee.  This was identical to an amendment offered on the…

25 Years After Bhopal, Too Little Progress

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Liz Borkowski, orginally posted 12/3/09 Twenty-five years ago, thousands of residents of Bhopal, India awoke in the middle of the night struggling to breathe. A Union Carbide pesticide plant had leaked 40 tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic substance that had escaped in gas form and spread quickly through the densely populated city. The Indian Council on Medical Research estimates that between 8,000 and 10,000 people died in the first three days after the catastrophe; another 25,000 perished later…

Happy Birthday Opportunity!

Can you imagine driving around on roadless terrain with a four wheel drive vehicle for eight years and not ever changing a tire, getting a tuneup, adjusting the suspension, replacing the hydraulics or brakes, or doing any other service whatsoever on your vehicle? I've actually done that, and I'm here to tell you, you can't do that! But Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has, in fact, done it. Opportunity was tasked to took around on the Martian surface for three months. The Space Robot landed on Mars on January 25th, 2004. During the last eight years, Opportunity has traveled great…

Basic Concepts: Fast Break

The term "fast break" refers to those situations in the game of basketball in which the offense is attempting to push the ball up the court and score quickly, rather than running a play from their normal offensive set. This usually involves a temporary numerical advantage for the offensive team, as the defenders hurry to get back into position. Any given fast break will last no more than a few seconds, but these are some of the most important seconds in a basketball game. Understanding the basics of the fast break is absolutely essential to playing basketball, or even watching it played. For…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome: So long, and thanks for all the lulz, Part II

ERV readers will absolutely love this paper. Recombinant Origin of the Retrovirus XMRV Okay, we all know ERVs are awesome evidence for evolution and common descent. But, imagine we could do classical ERV research one better. Imagine that we had DNA from one of THE common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees-- an ancestor who is the proud owner of a new ERV. Imagine we have its DNA, and the DNA of its parents, and the DNA of their parents. Then imagine we had the DNA of its children, and their children. Imagine the fun evolutionary research we could do, what we could see, with those kinds…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome

XMRV is so hot right now. Read the paper on XMRV and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome last weekend: Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome My conclusions from the paper: XMRV is capable of infecting humans and producing viable progeny. How this fact relates to CFS, Im still not sure. Let me go through exactly what these researchers did. 1-- Nested PCR looking for XMRV genomes. Nested PCR is kinda 'better' than regular PCR, especially when we are talking about retroviruses. How do you know the signal you are seeing is because of XMRV,…