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I sense a disturbance in the Force.

It's like the blogoverse suddenly got more concentrated or something. Oh wait, I remember! It's move-in day at the newly completed ScienceBlogs Towers! Look at all those moving vans! Look at all those bloggers! A quick run-down of my new neighbors (and their previous addresses) after the jump. And mad props to Sb Towers architect and interior designer Tim Murtaugh!! The Loom Carl Zimmer's excellent blog moves from Corante to Sb! (Old address: http://loom.corante.com/) The Frontal Cortex A new blog by Seed's Jonah Lehrer The World's Fair A new blog by science educator Dave Ng and…

Eyjafjallajökull continues to disrupt European air travel

A shot of the summit area of Eyjafjallajökull, showing the twin steam-and-ash plumes from the lava flow and active vent. Picture taken by Dr. Joseph Licciardi (UNH). Over the weekend, the newly reinvigorated ash eruptions from Eyjafjallajökull combined with favorable winds meant that ash from the eruption closed airspace over swaths of Europe, including Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria and Germany. These disruptions are continuing into the new week, although most of the disruption is for transatlantic flights. However, the threat of ash is more present than ever, as Ryanair…

Eyjafjallajökull Update for 5/7/2010

The GÃgjökull outlet glacier on Eyjafjallajökull, showing the steaming lava flow carving its way through the glacier. Image taken May 5, 2010 by Dr. Joseph Licciardi. A quick update on the ongoing activity at Eyjafjallajökull: The activity at the volcano continues to be more explosive during the last few days than it was in the previous week, leading to more potential for airspace closures over Europe if the winds were to shift. Currently, the VAAC ash advisory only seems to suggest that even Spain may get a taste of the ash sometime tomorrow, but most of Europe will be OK. However,…

Taking stock in the Eyjafjallajökull eruption and its aftermath

A night shot of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption showing the glowing plume from the strombolian explosions and the Aurora Borealis overhead. A quick update on the current activity at Eyjafjallajökull eruption: the eruption continues at the summit craters, but there seems to be less ash being erupted, at least yesterday. The latest update from the Icelandic Met Office suggest that things are settling down - but floods are still periodically being produced by melting of the glacier: Volcanic tremor has been similar the last 24 hours. GPS stations around Eyjafjallajökull showed deflation…

Busy week at the Italian volcanoes

The volcanoes of Italy must have known that Dr. Boris Behncke would be in the Q&A spotlight here at Eruptions because three have shown signs of new activity over the last week. Here is a quick summary based on information from Dr. Behncke and Sonia Calvari of IGVN. Etna erupting in 1989. Image by Dr. Boris Behncke. Etna On November 6, Etna in Italy appears to have entered a new phase of activity. The volcano had not produced any explosive events since July 4, 2009, but since 11/6, Etna has experienced a series of deep-seated explosive events - some of which suggest there is a lava lake…

The Silent Killer: Hospital-Acquired Infections

From the archives, comes this post about the health crisis no one cares about (except for the Mad Biologist. We are very caring): the 90,000 deaths per year from infections people get while in the hospital. And this number is probably an underestimate. Bacterial infections aren't sexy: no one walks, bikes, hops, pogo sticks for the cure. There are no ribbons, no bumper stickers, and no hot celebrities (damn!). Yet, according to the CDC, bacterial infections acquired in hospitals kill at least 90,000 people per year in the U.S. Granted some of those who died would have died from something…

The Wall around Old Town, Part 3: Atop the Wall

tags: Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia, cities Looking towards the next tower along the wall around Old Town. Photographed in Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia. Image: GrrlScientist, 22 July 2009 [larger view]. (raw image) This is, in my opinion, one of the most spectacular views I've ever had the pleasure to see. I hope my photographs from atop the wall around Old Town can capture this for you well enough that you understand what I saw and experienced while I was in Tallinn. Looking towards the next tower along the inner portion of wall around Old Town. Photographed in Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia.…

Shout out to Bora at A Blog around the Clock!

A shout out to Bora over at A Blog Around the Clock for re-posting the press release on the Rubik's Cube Tournament announcing that Professor Erno Rubik will be presenting the awards to the winners! From A Blog Around the Clock: Rubik's Cube Tournament - Winners Meet Professor Erno Rubik Category: Science Education Posted on: April 14, 2010 8:05 AM, by Coturnix From the USA Science & Engineering Festival: WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--It's the 30th Anniversary of the Rubik's Cube, and the USA Science & Engineering Festival is planning a You CAN Do the Rubik's Cube tournament in…

Metagenomics and the mystery of the dying bees

The next time you bite into a crisp juicy apple and the tart juices spill out around your tongue, remember the honeybee. Our fall harvest depends heavily on honeybees carrying pollen from plant to plant. Luscious fruits and vegetables wouldn't grace our table, were it not for the honeybees and other pollinators. Lately though, the buzz about our furry little helpers hasn't been good. Honeybees have been dying, victims of a new disease called "colony collapse disorder," with the US, alone losing a large number of hives in recent years. Why? Researchers have speculated about everything…

My picks from the ScienceDaily

Dominant Meerkats Render Rivals Infertile: When pregnant, dominant female meerkats subject their subordinates to escalating aggression and temporary eviction causing them to become overly stressed and as a result infertile, a new study finds. Does Environment Influence Genes? Researcher Gives Hard Thoughts On Soft Inheritance: Organisms, including humans, all inherit DNA from generation to generation, what biologists call hard inheritance, because the nucleotide sequence of DNA is constant and only changes by rare random mutation as it is passed down the generations. But there also is…

Human swine flu in pigs

When swine flu appeared, the pork producers were keen to say there was no connection or relationship between pigs and swine flu (even though the virus's genetic segments were all of swine origin). They didn't want anyone to call it swine flu, giving rise to the celebrated naming controversy. But then we started seeing pigs infected with human pandemic swine flu, both in the lab and in pig herds. It's likely the pigs got it from us, although which direction things went in isn't completely clear. But originally the virus made the jump from pigs to humans, probably sometime in late 2008 or…

Will the US be the Saudi Arabia of "Oil"?

A few readers have asked me to comment on Goldman Sachs' prediction that the US will be the world's largest Oil producer in 2017. I am delighted to do so. Several possible comments come to mind. 1. Apparently Crystal Meth has become the trendy drug at Goldman. 2. How did the Yes Men get this published under Goldman's Name? 3. Goldman is apparently even less optimistic about Saudi oil production than I am. They think the depletion curve is going to be a straight line downwards. 4. Oh, wait, they are talking about "oil" not oil! That "oil" stuff is almost infinite - you can magically turn…

Reform to 1872 Mining Law Long Overdue

The Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act (H.R. 2262) would revamp the 1872 federal law governing hardrock mining (mining for metals and gems, not for coal), and a new article from Business Week reports that the Act has the support of many local officials who worry about miningâs effects on air, water, and tourism. Industry officials donât like the House bill â which isn't surprising, because theyâve been getting such a sweet deal for more than a century. The General Mining Law of 1872 was intended to create incentives for settling the West, and it let miners take minerals from public lands…

Crohn's disease: exploring the causes

This is the fifth of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease. By Rachel Kirby There are about 500,000 (or approx 1 in 544 people) in the United States who suffer from Crohn's disease, and is most prevalent in both men and women between the ages of 20-30. Crohn's Disease is an autoimmune disease which causes a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. It can affect the entire digestive tract but is most prevalent in the lower small intestine and in the ileum. It will cause swelling, causing pain and diarrhea. More after the jump... Though a lot is known about the disease;…

Pediatrics Grand Rounds #16

Welcome to the newest edition of Pediatric Grand Rounds. Grab a chair, get comfortable, and take a gander at the latest blogging in the field of pediatrics. The dish in the blogosphere First, the hottest topic of the week (at least, from the collection of posts submitted here): environmental chemical and how they affect children. Clark of Unintelligent Design discusses the "dangers" (or not?) of environmental chemcials--including natural chemicals from our food, etc.-- for childrens' development. Over at Disease Proof, however, you'll find some disagreement. Revere at Effect Measure…

Anti-evolution censorship in Turkey

Darwin issue of a magazine is banned in Turkey: The title summarizes all the lunacy at once. After all the censorship towards evolution (and many other things), Turkish government finally took a giant step -backwards- for all mankind and blocked the whole issue of a scientific magazine. Darwin is now completely banned in Turkey. What a shame. (Note that the above link belongs to RichardDawkins.net, which is another banned website in Turkey. Therefore readers from Turkey can not access it) According to the news, the cover of the biggest and oldest magazine called Bilim ve Teknik (Science and…

direct imaging of extrasolar planets

Coronographic imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, on the Hubble Space Telescope, has revealed a jupiter mass planetary companion, with confirmed common proper motion with its parent star, Fomalhaut. This would be the first robust bona fide direct imaging detection of an extrasolar planet. Good catch from the mouth of the fish of the south. From Kalas et al (Science, Nov 14th 2008). Hubble press release now up Perspective article in Science (pdf) click for large image In a paper to appear on friday Nov 14th in Science, Kalas et al (pdf) show data from the Advanced Camera for…

Cost of work-related injury and disease higher than cost for heart disease, cancer

Money talks, as the saying goes, and a recently published paper on the annual cost of work-related injuries and illnesses should get policymakers to listen up. The number is staggering: $250 Billion, and it's a figure on par with health conditions like cancer, coronary heart disease, and diabetes that attract much more attention and research funding. The author, J. Paul Leigh, PhD, a professor of health economics at University of California Davis, assembled data from more than a dozen sources to estimate the annual economic burden of occupational injuries and illnesses. Using data from 2007…

Clean Water for a Healthy World

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Liz Borkowski, originally posted 3/22/10 Today is World Water Day, when the United Nations draws attention to the importance of freshwater and advocates for sustainable water-resource management. This year, the focus is on water quality, which is declining worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, each year 3.4 million people - most of them children - die from water-related diseases. That includes 1.4 million children dying from diarrhea annually, and 860,000 children perishing directly or…

Signal vs Noise

Over on my latest entry in the "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" guide, a commenter has taken issue with this passage: Discerning a trend from noisy data is one of the most basic processes in scientifc research, so even though this argument has a naive appeal to the majority of us with no statistical training, you can be sure that any scientifically trained individual trying to make a case for cooling out of this graph is not being intellectually honest. Please consider any source of this argument as very unreliable, either by being very uninformed about basic scientific processes, or very…

Q & A: Why is the Microwave Background so Uniform?

startswithabang.com reader Andy has a great follow-up to his question on the Age & Size of the Universe, and asks: why does the CBR “appear” to come from a light sphere that “appears” NOW to be larger than the universe WAS when it first set off in a straight line on its 13.4 billion year trip??? The "CBR" stands for "Cosmic Background Radiation," and it refers to the (presently) microwave background. Here's why Andy's question is actually profound, and was known for about 20 years as either the homogeneity problem or the horizon problem. The problem is that, when we look up at the sky,…

All science so far! Academic Freedom in Oklahoma

I love the interwebz. Youre just playing Google Goonies, searching for treasure in the internetz sewer tubes, and you find the neatest stuff. Like yesterday, I was Googling 'Paul Wesselhoft', cause he was one of the twats behind OKs 'Academic Freedom' bill, and he hates puppies, and I found this neat blog post by PastorDude: Oklahoma University is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of OUR tax money celebrating Darwin Day and forcing godless evolution onto the students. For example, they are paying Richard Dawkins, the world's leading atheist, $30,000 for a one hour lecture! LOL! God…

Coal. Need I say more?

Every corner of my regular morning stroll through the internet is littered with references to coal. One could say that coal is in the air. And it doesn't smell good. First, there's this depressing news from British Columbia: Teck-Cominco's eye-popping, $14-billion purchase of Fording Canadian Coal this week sends a clear signal that coal will play an important role in the future of British Columbia. The deal makes Teck-Cominco the world's second-largest producer of metallurgical coal -- the kind used in steelmaking -- and solidifies its status as Canada's largest diversified mining company.…

Stealth in Space, pt. 2

In the Stealth in Space post earlier this week, we discussed the problem of detecting the thermal emission from a spacecraft. If the interior isn't generating a lot of power, there's not much thermal radiation being emitted, making it a tough job to detect. But it was pointed out in the comments that the heat from the sun would itself warm the spacecraft exterior, increasing the thermal signature by potentially a large amount. Let's verify this. If you take a perfectly absorbing sphere and set it in orbit around the sun (say, at the distance of the Earth), it'll absorb all the light from…

The hacked climate science email scandal that wasn't

Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change. I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in…

Free Tibet (from global warming)

Here's one of those things that Carl Jung would call synchronicity, but is really just an example of how scientific research tends to converge on certain ideas. Item 1, which arrived in my email in box this morning in the form of a press release from the DC-based Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, discusses what attendees at a side-event to the Poznan climate negotiations heard about the the dangers of "black carbon," an important contributor to global warming. Here's the paragraph that got my attention: "Black carbon is extremely bad news because it contributes to…

A Nation of Neurotics? Blame the Puppet Masters?

Once again, I hear the siren song of Toxoplasma, the parasite that dwells in the brains of 50 million Americans. Toxoplasma gondii is an extraordinary creature, whose exploits I've chronicled in previous posts , an article in the New York Times and my book Parasite Rex. This single-celled organism has a life cycle that takes it from cats to other mammals and birds and back to cats again. Studies have shown that the parasite can alter the behavior of rats, robbing them of their normal fear of cats--and presumably making it easier for the parasites to get into their next host. Toxoplasma is…

A Prize Bug

This year's Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here). As my fellow Corantean, Derek Lowe, observes, this story follows the classic arc from, "You're completely bonkers" to "You're going to Stockholm." But it also illustrates a point that I made when last year's Nobelists were announced: it demonstrates how intimately woven evolutionary biology is becoming with medicine. It turns out that Helicobacter…

Less Is More: Better Memory With Fewer Neurons

Ever heard that "you're born with all the brain cells you'll ever have"? It turns out that could be a good thing - if it were true. A new study shows that at least in some circumstances, neurogenesis actually impairs memory performance. To understand why this might be the case, consider that adults are constantly generating new neurons in a long-term memory structure - the hippocampus. This region requires a large number of neurons to store episodic memories accumulated over a lifetime (and understandably so!). Similarly, to be able to store experiences that may have occurred very…

What may be bad habits for humans are protective for bees

Photo by: Leif Richardson, Dartmouth College I came across this neat press release from the University of Massachusetts: AMHERST, Mass. – Researchers studying the interaction between plants, pollinators and parasites report that in recent experiments, bees infected with a common intestinal parasite had reduced parasite levels in their guts after seven days if the bees also consumed natural toxins present in plant nectar. In this early and most comprehensive study of its kind, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Dartmouth College studied hundreds of eastern bumblebees…

More on proximity to industry – and similar ideas

In a recent post on openness and sharing in chemistry, I briefly touched on proximity to industry. This is actually somewhat nuanced and a few research studies have looked into it. As I mentioned Birnholtz, in his dissertation [1] and subsequent JASIST article [2] describes proximity to industry as both/either being funded by a commercial or industrial organization and/or "the extent to which there is an interest by researchers or others in commercializing or otherwise profiting financially from research discoveries" (dissertation, p27). There's the myth that the research university gets all…

How do we remember scenes?

Take a look at this quick movie. What you'll see is two sets of three views of the same scene (our living room). For each group of three views, your job is to decide if the third view is taken from the same angle as one of the two previous views. After the first two views flash by, the text "Same?" will appear, and that's your cue to decide if the third view is the same as EITHER of the first two. Give it a shot: Do you think you got the correct answer? Was either of the two sequences more difficult than the other? The movie was inspired by a recent experiment led by Monica Castelhano.…

CSI Brookhaven: 500-year-old Hair Tells Story of Royal Mercury Poisoning

Hair breaks. It singes. It falls out. It might not be the strongest feature of living human bodies, but hair is one of the best-preserved tissues of dead ones, providing a record of diet, age, metabolism, and, sometimes, even the cause of death. Ferdinand II* With intense beams of x-rays at Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), a team of researchers is using hair samples collected from the decomposed bodies of two 15th century Italian royalty to determine how they really died. The subjects: Ferdinand II (1467-1496)* and Isabella (1470-1524) of Aragon, a medieval kingdom…

Book Review: What I Require From Life

It would be fair to say that, until a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about J.B.S. Haldane. I knew he was a British biologist who helped form the subdiscipline of population genetics, but that was about it. Then, unexpectedly, Oxford University Press sent me a copy of What I Require From Life: Writings on Science and Life From J.B.S. Haldane. What I Require From Life is neither an autobiography nor a comprehensive compilation of Haldane's writings. Instead it is a motley collection of Haldane's short essays written for the communist newspaper The Daily Worker (1937-1950) and pieces he…

David Karoly on Plimer

Professor David Karoly of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences is an expert on climate change, so like every other scientist who has read Ian Plimer's error-filled book, he was appalled at how bad it was. His review: Now let me address some of the major scientific flaws in Plimer's arguments. He claims 'it is not possible to ascribe a carbon dioxide increase to human activity' and 'volcanoes produce more CO2 than the world's cars and industries combined'. Both are wrong. Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide enriched with carbon isotope C12and reduced C13 and…

The Australian's War on Science 75: Plimer vs Plimer

The Australian has continued its war on science by printing an extract from Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled from School. The extract is largely plagiarised from this press release on a recent paper in Science by Funder et al finding large fluctuations in Arctic sea ice over the last 10,000 years. Plimer did change this passage in the press release In order to reach their surprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland. to this: In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the…

The Australian's War on Science 55: Michael Asten

The Australian takes another one of its shots against science with a piece by Michael Asten who claims: A recent peer-reviewed paper by Svetlana Jevrejeva from Britain's National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool, provides a calculation of 0.6m-1.6m by 2100 using a range of climate models. However, these models also show predicted sea-level change rates of 4.2mm-5.4mm a year for the first decade of the 21st century. I contrast these predictions with just published observations by Riccardo Riva from Delft in The Netherlands and international colleagues who use satellite technology to measure…

Akermangate: Piers Akerman fabricates some more

Piers Akerman's response to being busted for fabricating a quote is simply dishonest. For instance: The little Crikey website had a defamatory reference to The Independent and me, clearly unsupported by any research. If you read the story in The Independent, you will see that The Independent verified that the bogus quote did not appear in Houghton's book as Akerman claimed. They also contacted Houghton who emphatically denied saying anything like it. They also searched for all mentions of the bogus quote on the Internet and found that the very first one was by Akerman. They also…

Book Review: What I Require From Life, by J.B.S. Haldane

Originally posted by Brian Switek On February 22, 2009, at 6:18 PM It would be fair to say that, until a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about J.B.S. Haldane. I knew he was a British biologist who helped form the subdiscipline of population genetics, but that was about it. Then, unexpectedly, Oxford University Press sent me a copy of What I Require From Life: Writings on Science and Life From J.B.S. Haldane. What I Require From Life is neither an autobiography nor a comprehensive compilation of Haldane's writings. Instead it is a motley collection of Haldane's short essays written for the…

Valinetines: Valentines for Scientists

Two years ago, The Scientific Activist introduced the world to valinetines, scientifically-themed valentines named after the amino acid valine. Last year, I recycled the same valinetines from the first year, but today--on this Valentine's Day 2008--I bring you all new material: Your nuclear pore Is far from a bore: Let anyone in And then beg for more. But your active site Is perfectly tight, Evolved so it fits My substrate just right. Or, for the more biophysically inclined, here's an NMR valinetine: My NMR magnet Is just inadequate For globular domains So impressively sized. For tumble as…

More Trouble for the Schatten Lab, but One Potential Success

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity announced this week that it has found a former postdoc in Gerald Schatten's lab, Park Jong Hyuk, guilty of research misconduct for falsifying images in a manuscript on deriving embryonic stem cells from cloned rhesus monkeys. Although the paper had not yet been submitted for peer review, this is more bad news for Schatten, who has been dealing with the fallout from being a senior author on one of the papers later determined to have been fabricated by discredited South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk. The AP reports: The latest university probe showed…

Phylogeny Friday - 12 May 2006

I've been busy this past week (and I'll be busy in the next couple of weeks to come), so I don't have much time to post to evolgen. For this reason this week's Phylogeny Friday is a recycled post from the old site. Check out the comments on the original entry for some remarks from one of the authors of the paper I discuss. I'll try to get some original content up here, but blogging may be slow until the end of the month. Now that we have entered the post-genomics era, with the genomes of most model organisms completely sequenced (as well as the human genome), it is up to genome centers,…

Hybrid Speciation Strikes Again

We usually think of speciation as a bifurcating process -- a single lineage splitting into two. The relationships of those species can often be determined using DNA sequences. But we know that there are exceptions, like horizontal gene transfer in bacteria. And hybrid speciation in plants. These exceptions often interfere with our ability to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of those species. Hybrid speciation occurs when two species produce hybrids that are both fit and capable of becoming reproductively isolated from the two parental species. The new species will often exploit a…

Children's Books for the Holiday Season

I don't know about you, but I always wait until the last minute to get obligatory holiday gifts. And then I hate going to anything like a mall or shopping center. Praise be to Amazon.com and UPS. His Dark Materials (trilogy) From the publsiher, on book I: When Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon decide to spy on a presentation her uncle, the commanding Lord Asriel, is making to the elders of Jordan College they have no idea that they will become witnesses to an attempted murder--and even less that they are taking the first steps in a journey that will lead them into danger and adventure…

The worst argument against global warming gets worserer

Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever: Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented. And you didn't think he would be able to top his argument about climate change that was inconsistent with the existence of seasons. This is an argument about astronomy that assumes that you can't see stars without a telescope. Wait, there's more: What has not occurred to Quiggin,…

From The Desk of Zelnio: Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis

Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis (Mollusca: Cephalopoda: Octipodidae) Octopus are one the most fascinating and intelligent of the invertebrates. Yet, little is known about their role in the deep sea, even less is known from methane seeps of hydrothermal vents! In fact, only one species has been described from a hydrothermal vent to date, the "hot water volcano octopus". Description Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis (1) is a benthic octopus that so far measures up to only 52mm in mantle length (7).  Its eyes are greatly reduced in function (i.e. no visible iris) and body lacks pigment and…

They write letters

From Insight on the World, 1997 (shortly after his first election): Insight: Has your lack of political experience been a problem? Jim Ryun: No. In the campaign that was a strength. Part of our campaign was to go door-to-door talking to people instead of spending time in forums, television or radio. And the comment we heard most often was, "You're not a typical politician. You answer our questions. We like that." From the Atchison Daily Globe: I have repeatedly contacted U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun’s office to express my opinion and ask that he consider a point as my representative. I kept on because…

Listening to Your Pulse

An interesting new study looks at how being able to count your own heartbeats - the most elemental form of biofeedback - correlates with better decision-making, at least when playing the Iowa Gambling Task. Here's Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section: A team of psychologists in Germany asked people to count their own heartbeats (without taking a pulse) and then asked them to play a computer gambling game, which required choosing repeatedly among four card decks that yielded different returns. People who were more accurate at counting their own heartbeats picked more cards from the…

The extracted history of Greenland/Kalaallisut

Interesting that I just pointed to Neandertal DNA, a really big story just came out on ancient Greenlander genetics, Whole Genome of Ancient Human Is Decoded: The genome of a man who lived on the western coast of Greenland some 4,000 years ago has been decoded, thanks to the surprisingly good preservation of DNA in a swatch of his hair so thick it was originally thought to be from a bear. This is the first time the whole genome of an ancient human has been analyzed, and it joins the list of just eight whole genomes of living people that have been decoded so far. It also sheds new light on the…

History through biology

Ancient DNA: Reconstruction Of The Biological History Of A Human Society: A research team has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains. Knowing the history of past populations and answering unresolved questions about them is highly interesting, more so when the information is obtained from the extraction of genetic material from historical remains. An example is the necropolis at Aldaieta (Araba) where some of these mysteries about these peoples have been answered - thanks to the study of…