Search Content

Displaying results 12651 - 12700 of 87950

You don't like coconuts

At one of this holiday's events, someone asked when I knew I wanted to be a marine biologist. It was college when I realized I could make a living by 'playing' in the ocean. However, I have always wanted to explore new frontiers both intellectually and physically. A quote from my favorite movie of all time from an explorer's heart, "You don't like coconuts! Say, brainless, don't you know where coconuts come from? Lookit here - from Tahiti - Fiji Islands, the Coral Sea!" He pulls a magazine from his pocket and shows it to her. "A new magazine! I never saw it before." "Of course you never.…

Snow-a-lama-ding dong - in Louisiana???

I was going to go to school and give a final. I guess that is not going to happen now. My daughter measured 7 inches of snow - in Hammond, Louisiana (50 miles from New Orleans). Here are some pictures - more to come (plus video). From Winter Storm 2008 From Winter Storm 2008 From Winter Storm 2008

Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, May 26, 2013

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Chronicling a new Age of Consequences May 26, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, GWSP, State of Nature, MAHB, Moore EF5, Otto Consensus , Warnings, Subsidies, Thermodynamics, Cook, Shrinkology Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Research Station, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, GMO Labelling, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Extreme Weather, GHGs, Carbon Cycle, Temperatures…

On being foreign

When I was a child during the early to mid 1980s about once a week someone would ask me where I was from, or, would compliment me on my English. Since I had only recently arrived from Bangladesh I would tell them I was from that land and as for the compliment directed toward my language skills I took it as just that. Over the past 20 some years there has been a noticeable drop in the number of these events, roughly declining in frequency as a proportion of the time from 1980 or so. I would offer that over the past year I've been complimented on my English perhaps on average once every 4 or…

Wild birds and wild guesses

The fact seven people in Azerbaijan contracted bird flu from wild birds has been assumed for some time and now has been officially confirmed by researchers in Germany: Four people have died after catching avian flu from infected swans, in the first confirmed cases of the disease being passed from wild birds, scientists have revealed. The victims, from a village in Azerbaijan, are believed to have caught the lethal H5N1 virus earlier this year when they plucked the feathers from dead birds to sell for pillows. Three other people were infected by the swans but survived. Andreas Gilsdorf, an…

The 12th annual Ilan Ramon Space Olympics (Rehovot, we have a winner)

Is this science writer jazzed that ninth-grade girls from a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem won a space/science contest? You bet your sweet solar-powered spacelab she is! It is not just that these girls beat out a lot of other classes (over 400), or that they break more than one stereotype. They also came up with a pretty clever idea for studying the Sun: Send a spacecraft to scatter assorted nanolabs all over an asteroid that is about to pass close to the Earth on its way to the Sun. The contest is held every year in memory of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who went down with the crew of…

Exploding graphs and seeing stars

One of my hobbies lately has been to get either RNA seq or microarray data from GEO and do quick analyses. Not only is this fun, I can find good examples to use for teaching biology. One of these fun examples comes from some Arabidopsis data. In this experiment, some poor little seedlings were taken out of their happy semi-liquid culture tubes and allowed to dry out. This simulated drought situation isn't exactly dust bowls and hollow-eyed farmers, but the plants don't know that and most likely respond in a similar way. We can get a quick idea of how the plants feel about their situation…

Anders Söderberg on Sigtuna Metalworking

I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks that nobody ever opens. Impressive work! The excavation of the Trädgårdsmästaren block in Sigtuna 1988-90 hasn't yet been published, but the dig is of tremendous archaeological value since it covered 1100 square meters and spans about 270 years, from the founding of the town in the late 10th centiry…

Neanderthals' Cousins, Not the Fockers: the Denisovans

David Reich/Nature The entire genome of the Denisovans was extracted from a tooth and finger bone. The film "Little Fockers" is coming out this week, and I look forward to brilliant performances from Robert DiNero, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand to name a few. If you will excuse my cheekiness, I thought of this dysfunctional family when I learned today of the "Denisovans". Let me explain. The human tree of life appears to have a new branch: cousins of the Neanderthals, the "Denisovans". The New York Times reporter Carl Zimmer has had a busy week. First, he reported…

Antibiotic Resistance in Chimps

There's an interesting news story about antibiotic resistance in wild chimpanzee populations that claims to have found transfer of resistant Escherichia coli from humans to wild animals. According to the article: To do the study, the UI researchers, working with colleagues from Makerere University in Uganda and McGill University in Canada , examined 2 of the communities of chimpanzees living in the Kibale park. One of them has been under study by scientists for more than 2 decades. The other is visited regularly by ranger guides who shepherd tourists in the park. The researchers collected…

Yoneda's Lemma

So, at last, we can get to Yoneda's lemma, as I [promised earlier][yoneda-promise]. What Yoneda's lemma does is show us how for many categories (in fact, most of the ones that are interesting) we can take the category C, and understand it using a structure formed from the functors from C to the category of sets. (From now on, we'll call the category of sets **Set**.) So why is that such a big deal? Because the functors from C to the **Set** define a *structure* formed from sets that represents the properties of C. Since we have a good intuitive understanding of sets, that means that Yoneda's…

Friday Fractal XIV

Emergence: Complex patterns arise from the simplest rules. From lighter elements emerge heavier compounds; from clouds of gasses and particles arise galaxies, stars, and planets. From basic atmospheric reactions between basic chemical compounds, the building blocks of life, amino acids emerge. From these acids, patterns of DNA emerge; from DNA, simple life. From simple life forms, complex forms arise, filling countless niches and functions, each form intricately involved from another. From these interactions, ecosystems arise. In these ecosystems, complex beings, dependent upon vast arrays of…

Role Models in Expo's 'Meet the Scientists/Engineers' Are Ready to Inspire Your Kids! Another Amazing Opportunity for Teachers Too!

Imagine the opportunity for your kids to chat one-on-one with some of the nation's top scientists, engineers and other professionals in such fields as medical research, the CIA, oceanography, microbiology, and technology intellectual property law! They'll get the chance at the finale Expo at the end of this month when the Festival, in association with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), hosts its Meet the Scientists/ Engineers sessions. These informal gatherings, part of the Festival's STEM Career Pavilion initiative, will allow students to conduct in-person interviews with a wide…

How humans started a bacterial pandemic in chickens

The prospect of infections spreading from animals to humans has become all too real with the onset of the current swine flu pandemic, and the threat of a bird flu still looming. But infections can jump the other way too. Decades before the world's media were gripped with panic over bird flu, humans transferred a disease to chickens and it has since caused a poultry pandemic right under our noses.  The infection in question is a familiar one - Staphylococcus aureus, a common human bacterium that's behind everything from mild skin infections to life-threatening MRSA. It causes chicken…

The secret history of Africa

In light of the relatively recent interaction of Bantu farmers and Pygmies in Central Africa, this paper is of note, Genetic and demographic implications of the Bantu expansion: insights from human paternal lineages: The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present (YBP) in west/central Africa and spread all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, may represent one of the major and most rapid demographic movements in the history of the human species. Although the genetic footprints of this expansion have been unmasked through the analyses of the maternally-inherited…

Counting animals: written in blood?

Interesting article from The Economist science section about establishing the presence of shy animals in rainforests by examining leech blood. A highlight comes from one of my relatives: They also found genetic material from the... small-toothed ferret-badger, which is (apparently) impossible to distinguish from the related Burmese ferret-badger without getting close enough to handle it.

Shortest Paths and Greedy Relaxation

Another really fun and fundamental weighted graph problem is the shortest path problem. The question in: given a connected weighted graph G, what is the shortest path between two vertices v and w in G? To be precise, the weight of a path is just the sum of the weight of the edges that make up the path. The shortest path between two vertices is the path with minimum weight. There are a ton of solutions to this problem. I'm going to show one of the easiest to understand ones, which is Djikstra's algorithm. Djikstra's algorithm for the shortest path combines two very interesting algorithmic…

Cultural differences of opinion about plagiarism.

In a post months and months ago, I wrote the following*: I've heard vague claims that there are some cultures in which "plagiarism" as defined by U.S. standards is not viewed as an ethical breach at all, and that this may explain some instances of plagiarism among scientists and science students working in the U.S. after receiving their foundational educational experiences in such cultures. To my readers oversees: Is there any truth to these claims? (I'm suspicious, at least in part because of an incident I know of at my school where a student from country X, caught plagiarising, asserted, "…

Scientific Life Surpasses Five Million Visits!

tags: five million, sitemeter Many thanks to everyone who has visited my blog, it has been a pleasure writing for you. I was watching sitemeter as it passed the five millionth visitor just now, so (amazingly), I know who it was. This person was from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and was popping in from behind-the-scenes, so I'll give you one guess as to who it was. Contrary to a certain someone's accounts on twitter, the four millionth, nine-hundred and ninety-nine thousandth, nine-hundred and ninety-ninth visitor was from Memphis, Tennessee and the five millionth and first visitor was…

A photographic review of the year

January: Cold in Cambridge (but this is from early-Feb, since I don't have anything terribly good from January. The best I can offer is smoke on the water). February: early bees. March: Phoebe. Our cat. April: Petals on water. May: Humble bumbles. June: Stubai. The entire place is unbearably gorgeous. If you have a robust sense of humour, try this from the Franz Senn hut gents. If you have an even more robust sense, then this. July: Summer in the garden. August: Mallorca. September: Chris's wedding. October: Amsterdam. November: Winter head. December: Cold again (from 2010. I don't…

Mini-Movie Monday: Genesis Episode 4: Atoms (Synopsis)

“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” -Niels Bohr There's a wonderful story that the Universe tells us about itself: the story of where everything in it came from, and how it came to be this way. From the perspective of a human being, there's possibly no component of that as important to our existence as the humblest of all building blocks: the atoms. Image credit: (c) Theodore W. Gray, from http://periodictable.com/. Yet when the Universe first cooled from the Big Bang, over 99.999999% of what existed was nothing more than hydrogen and helium. So where did the atoms…

Compound from bear bile helps slow diabetes in mice

A new study from Science Translational Medicine (DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.3006534) presents data showing that tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA), a compound isolated from the bile of bears, may actually slow the development of type 1 diabetes (in mice at least). It is thought to work by reducing stress responses from the endoplasmic reticulum in the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas which become defective in type 1 diabetes. Use of bear bile is common in traditional Chinese medicine, and at one time led to near-extinction of black bears in China. Fortunately, synthetic versions of…

Kenji Miyazawa

Kenji Miyazawa was a 20th century Japanese poet who loved Nature and Science. In a New Scientist article Roger Pulvers who has translated Miyazawa's poems describes him as a tireless and faithful chronicler of nature. A beautiful line from one of his poems quoted in the article: Messengers, so to speak, of a catalogue of light From every possible era that is or ever was. This "catalogue of light" is a catalogue of time. Miyazawa recognises that the light from the celestial objects we see represents images from different times in the past. At a time when Einstein's theories were not well…

Minnesota. If you don't like the weather .... you better get into the basement.

Got home from the lake last night happy to see that our neighborhood was spared any significant damage from the big giant storm that engulfed several local communities, including ours. There was very large hail up-stream from us and there are a few big trees down not far from here. The people really hit were in Hugo, where a twister formed and touched down, doing a very large amount of damage and killing one child. Ana's sibling (you know Ana, she's running for president) not far from the twiseter saw a giant oak tree sucked into the sky and carried off to oz. I suspect no tornadoes…

You're not from around here, are you?

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." -John Steinbeck Here on Earth, we all get to enjoy the delight of being located in an extremely fortuitous place in our Solar System. Not just today, mind you, but billions of years ago, when the Solar System's planets were first forming! Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech, retrieved from Jodrell Bank CfA. Located close enough to our Sun, when the Earth first formed, like our neighbors Mercury,…

PZ Myers Expelled, Gains Sainthood

As you have undoubtedly heard, a group of evolutionary biologists and evolutionary biology supporters attended a showing of the movie Expelled, in the Twin Cities, last night. This group included the very famous Richard Dawkins and the only slightly less famous PZ Myers. PZ and Richard, in fact, were together in line, along with PZ's spouse, a daughter, and a future son in law. Other evolution supporters and at least one local evolutionary-type blogger were also in line. While waiting in line and minding their own business, PZ was spotted by the Expelled! production staff, and EXPELLED…

Another Week of GW News, October 2, 2011

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the Internet Firehose...October 2, 2011 Chuckles, Horn of Africa, Overshoot, Maathai, Jet Stream, IMECHE GDP, Subsidies, Ecocide, Cook Fukushima Note, Fukushima News, Nuclear Policy Melting Arctic, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food vs. Biofuel, GMOs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks,…

Some Nerdy Genomics Humor: Sequencing Unicornos

Inspired by this funny satire of mouse genomics research ("Tedious scientists hail uninspiring mouse genome breakthrough"), I dug up this funny article in a newsletter from the genome center at which I work: 30x sequencing of Unicornos Typically the stuff of legends, the [sequencing center] will sequence DNA from the genus Unicornos to high coverage. Tracing the origin of the unicorn points to a 4th century B.C. Greek doctor named Ctesias who most likely fused details of multiple creatures to create the unicorn from the many tales he heard from Indian travelers in Persia. During that era it…

Open thread: Who is the typical Terra Sig reader?

We were asked recently by our ScienceBlogs hosts: Is there a 'typical ScienceBlogs reader'? Who are these people? Why do they read Sb? What do they get out of it? From my comments, e-mails, and traffic patterns, most of you have advanced degrees and are reading from universities, drug companies, US federal agencies (including the military), and some newspapers and scientific publishers. While mostly American, a good many of you are from Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Your age ranges from the early 20s to the early 60s. Many of you are practicing scientists, physicians, or other…

FDA (finally) says that cloned food is OK

Finally: A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats. The 968-page "final risk assessment," not yet released but obtained by The Washington Post, finds no evidence to support opponents' concerns that food from clones may harbor hidden risks. But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones -- and that cloning…

What is popular here?

And while I’m at it rounding up the year ... Top ten posts (from any year) for visits this past year Strange beastie in Maine Polar bears are threatened Epic takedown of Pivar From sea to shining sea Last LOL I promise, well maybe Possibly the dumbest argument ever against atheism Beware the catfish from hell Oreskes responds to Shulte Wizzened baby animal alert An international coalition of non-religious ID scientists & scholars I’m guessing that #1, #2 & #9 are popular because of Google image searches. Others are popular due to link-love from Pharyngula or people’s obsession with…

Now, This Is Open Innovation

This was in the comments from my blog post on Pfizer's semi-open innovation. I don't normally highlight comments like this, but sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due. Why deal with Pfizer in the first place? Anything you might find they'll keep and you're SOL. We have a compound library that started from 1.4 million cmpds from Chemdiv, Chembridge, Maybridge and Tripos. I talked them into using our exclusion criteria (developed by my old buddies from Pharmacia - we all got Pfired when Pfizer took over Kazoo) and got rid of all the junk we didn't want (1 million). From there…

ScienceOnline'09 - from the West

Hmmm, who is coming from the wild, wild West? Two from Washington state: Deepak Singh and John McKay. Two from Oregon: Bill Hooker and Maureen Hoatlin. From New Mexico: Sol Lederman. And of course a bunch of Californians: Craig McClain, Erin Davis, Janet Stemwedel, Alex Lee, Rick MacPherson, Neeru Paharia, Miriam Goldstein, Peggy Kolm, Andrew Su, Peter Binfield and Aaron Rowe.

Catfish and Capitalism

Radley Balko has a brilliant essay on the Fox News page about a series of ill-considered government policies to protect American catfish farms from competition from Vietnamese competition. Then after reading that, you really should go read the hilariously idiotic emails he received from the hyper-patriots. I particularly enjoyed the one from the guy complaining about "unregulated fish parts" flooding the market.

John Lott's number two fan

Last year blogger Xrlq href="http://xrlq.com/2004/03/17/hat-of-the-day-stim-lamberts-xrlq/" rel="nofollow">dismissed my criticism of Lott as "paranoid rantings" and "gratuitous attacks on Lott personally", calling me "Dim", "Timwit", "Timbecile", "a jerk" and "Dim Lambert". This year I noted that Lott had signed his name to a review of Freakonomics using the same Amazon account that he used for a five-star review his own book. Over the years the account name had changed from JL to washingtonian2 to economist123. Xrlq href="http://xrlq.com/2005/05/11/lottsa-personalities/" rel="nofollow…

Students Experience the Field Trip of a Lifetime at the X-STEM Symposium!

This past Tuesday, over 3,500 students, in grades 6-12, traveled to the Washington D.C. Convention Center to engage in presentations and hands-on workshops from some of the most creative and inspiring minds in STEM at the 2nd X-STEM Symposium. Sponsored by MedImmune, the X-STEM Symposium featured over 30 speaker presentations from advanced luminaries in STEM fields such as Dean Kamen, Inventor and Founder of FIRST; Dr. Aprille Ericsson from NASA; Dr. Irwin Jacobs, Founder of Qualcomm to young up and coming innovators like 13 year old Alyssa Carson, AKA the NASA Blueberry and 19 year old…

LIGO's Black Holes Probably Did Not Come From One Star (Synopsis)

"Even if the Fermi detection is a false alarm, future LIGO events should be monitored for accompanying light irrespective of whether they originate from black hole mergers. Nature can always surprise us." -Avi Loeb Ever since LIGO first announced the direct detection of gravitational waves from two merging black holes, the physics and astronomy community has been struggling to understand an unexpected phenomenon that appears to have come along with it: a short-period gamma ray burst. An artist’s impression of two stars orbiting each other and progressing (from left to right) to merger with…

Two-Word Lyrics Quiz, #3

As you can guess from the title, I've done this twice before when I had stuff to do that precluded quality blogging. Kate's in Rochester for a court appearance, leaving me home with SteelyKid, so this seems like a perfect occasion for a third go-round. The pairs of words in the following list are consecutive words from pop songs that I think might be identifiable given just those two words.The songs range from kind of obvious to impossibly obscure. If you think you know the answer, post a comment completing the line, and then suggest your own two-word phrase from a different song for other…

Frogs in Jars and Skeletons at Tables (and other States of Decay)

Says Slate.com: "Boston artist Rosamond Purcell repurposes the old, the burnt, and the mangled." They (Slate) have a slide show about/from Purcell's new book, Bookworm. Check it out here. Go ahead. I'll wait. No worries. Waiting...waiting...waiting... Okay, now you're back. The first caption notes: Over the years, Boston artist Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered…

Popular governor, unpopular President

In SurveyUSA's latest poll of presidential approval in all 50 states, there are only 5 states where a majority backs him, and only 7 where a plurality approves. Kansas is moving back to the president, up to -4% net approval, the tenth most supportive state and a shift of 15%. That move was largely among Republicans, who went from 31% net approval to 55%. Democratic net approval ticked up 8%, while independent approval dropped 10%. Conservative approval returned to levels found two months ago, moderate approval held perfectly still. Liberal approval dropped 6%. Meanwhile, Governor Sebelius…

Life Science and Physical Science Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Physical Science. Droplets falling into water. From Flickr, by Marcus Vegas Life Science. From Flickr, by shioshvili Reader comments of the week: In More thoughts on animal research: Pets and wild animals benefit, too, Sandra of Discovering Biology in a Digital World offers a new take on the animal research controversy. Vaccines tested on lab animals protect not just humans, but animals themselves—pets, agricultural livestock, and even wild…

Genetic Study Kills Off Solutrean Hypothesis

I've blogged before about the woebegone Solutrean hypothesis, and I'm happy to say that it is now dead. The oldest well-characterised archaeological culture in America is the Clovis culture. Its main diagnostic type is a large knapped stone spearhead with a fluted base. The Solutrean hypothesis starts from a comparison with spearheads from the Solutrean culture in south-west Europe, noting that certain Solutrean points have an outline that is similar to that of Clovis points. Is the Clovis point a typological descendant on the Solutrean point? No, say most Palaeolithic scholars, because never…

How did Life on Earth Originate?

I was thinking about the timeline that brought us here, today, from the origin of the Universe up through the present day. I realized that the most uncertain thing that we know of, the step that we have the least information about, is the origin of life on Earth. All hypotheses about how life on Earth originated fall into three categories: Abiogenesis, or the idea that life came from non-life, somehow, on Earth. Life originated elsewhere in the Universe, and was brought to Earth, where it now thrives (e.g., panspermia, or exogenesis). Life was created or designed by an outside force/being…

Two encouraging polls about extremism

Islamic distain for Islamic extremism Muslim people in the Middle East are getting fed up with Islamic extremism. This is indicated by a new poll from the Pew Research Center. Nigerians, regardless of religion, dislike Boko Haram. Ninety-two percent of Lebanese are concerned about extremism in their country (that's the highest number in the poll) up from 81 percent last year. Majorities in most of the nations polled are concerned about extremism. And in most Middle Eastern countries, concern about extremism has increased in the past year. In Lebanon, which shares a long border with…

One tall man, two lucky dolphins and some sad news

From the annals of the weird and wonderful comes this tale of a pair of lucky dolphins: The world's tallest man helped save two dolphins in China by reaching into their stomachs and pulling out harmful plastic they had swallowed, state media said Thursday. The dolphins got sick after eating plastic from the edge of their pool at an aquarium in Liaoning province. Veterinarians said they decided to call for help from Bao Xishun, a 7-foot-9-inch herdsman from Inner Mongolia, according to Chinese state media. Photos from the scene show Bao reaching his arm, which is more than one metre long,…

From the people who brought you Tech Central Station...

DCI Group, a PR company that specializes in astroturf operations has been revealed by the WSJ as the group behind a youtube video mocking Al Gore: Everyone knows Al Gore stars in the global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." But who created "Al Gore's Penguin Army," a two-minute video now playing on YouTube.com? In the video, Gore appears as a sinister figure who blames the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming. (See the video.) The video's maker is listed as "Toutsmith," a 29-year-old who identifies himself as being from Beverly Hills in…

Working with Light

Compare these two images, both of the same swarm of mating ants: What's the difference? The lighting, of course. In the first image I stood facing the rising sun so that the insects' translucent wings glowed, while in the second I moved to shoot the swarm from another angle, the sun hitting them from the side. A much plainer result, to my eye. Managing light is the most important aspect of photographic composition. Entire books (as well as some fantastic blogs) have been written on the subject. I can't compete with that level of detail in a short blog post, so let me instead distill the…

Finnish population structure won't persist much longer

In my previous post on Finnish population clustering I should have emphasised that the map was constructed only from individuals who had both parents from the same geographic/linguistic region; this obviously provides a lot more power to detect a correlation. The close match between genetic and geographic ancestry in these selected individuals indicates that there hasn't been a huge amount of long-range admixture between Finnish populations over quite a long period of time - if there had been, there would be no reason to expect much correlation between the two maps. However, data in the…

Environment, Humanities & Soc. Sci., and Education & Careers Weekly Update

In this entry, you will find: The large versions of the Environment, Humanities & Social Science, and Education and Careers channel photos and the best posts of the week. Environment. From Flickr, by KhayaL The eagle soars high in a cloudless blue sky. Earlier this week, Darren Naish from Tetrapod Zoology posted "When eagles go bad, all over again," a delightful and informative piece about how eagles are vicious and predatory creatures that kill large mammals—even humans occasionally (according to eyewitnesses). I think they are adorable despite. Some Environment posts we really dug…

Indon bird flu case: consider the source

The report of another bird flu death from Indonesia wouldn't seem to be "news." In a way, the fact it isn't "news" is news but we'll put that aside for the moment. Another thing about the story that isn't news is that the victim is a young person from the city of Jakarta, not a resident from a poor rural household living cheek by jowl with poultry: The Health Ministry has confirmed that a West Jakarta shop attendant died of the bird flu Friday, increasing the country's human death toll from the virus to 86. Ministry spokeswoman Lily Sulistyawati said test results for the latest bird flu…