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Shout out for a good textual smackdown on the molecules

On my other weblog someone is asking about genetics & evolution texts. Specifically they were wondering about the order in which to read Principles of Population Genetics, Evolutionary Genetics and Quantitative Genetics. That was actually the order I suggested, the first book is more basic and broader, while the two latter texts are more specific. In fact the last book is to some extent an elaboration of just one chapter in Principles of Population Genetics. Additionally, I recommended Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics if you want to take the "next step" in specialization (the…

Day 1 of hot sauce - Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce

So, I tried out Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce with some Tuna pasta yesterday. Here's a comment from Amazon: "I am a real fan of hot sauce, hot peppers and anything that makes my eyes water, and I have to honestly say that Dave's Insanity Sauce is absolutely the hottest thing I've ever tasted. I use one drop in about 25 ounces of home-made tomato sauce and it makes the sauce noticibly hot. This is NOT a sauce to dash into your soup or to liven up some salsa." Hm. So I was warned. I tried a drop...and well, it was spicy, but not that spicy. So I tried a dash. Definitely made me sweat, but it…

Convergent evolution in skin color - part n

Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians: ...these results point to the importance of several genes in shaping the pigmentation phenotype and a complex evolutionary history involving strong selection. Polymorphisms in two genes, ASIP and OCA2, may play a shared role in shaping light and dark pigmentation across the globe while SLC24A5, MATP, and TYR have a predominant role in the evolution of light skin in Europeans but not in East Asians. These findings support a case for the recent convergent evolution of a lighter pigmentation phenotype in…

Jerry Coyne gets email

Coyne was quoted in this article on homeschooling, which brought in an unexpected surge of email, including some rather nasty words from the Christians. This doesn't surprise me at all; criticizing religion, especially the more far-out beliefs that are clearly unsupportable and in contradiction to all of the evidence, is always a reliable trigger to start some kooks spewing. Homeschooling is another trigger. People care very much about their kids, and so telling them that they're wrecking their children's future by giving them a substandard education poisoned with a falsified ideology is not…

Why blog about science?

Chris has an excellent post up about the "why" and "what" in regards to science blogs. I have already sketched out why I blog in the generalities, it is really a function of my egoism. The one thing I would add, or elaborate, in regards to Chris' post is that I do think science blogs play a very important role in adding a layer of intellectual granularity to the understanding of educated and science savvy folk of specific fields. If you encounter science purely through popularizations, no matter how well written they are you might get a distorted sense. As an illustration, as Chris has…

Villages 400,000 years ago?

Strange. Rise of man theory 'out by 400,000 years'. I'm skeptical, not that I know anything in detail about palaeanthropology aside from books and a few advanced courses. In any case: Our earliest ancestors gave up hunter-gathering and took to a settled life up to 400,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to controversial research. ... Professor Ziegert claims that the thousands of blades, scrapers, hand axes and other tools found at sites such as Budrinna, on the shore of the extinct Lake Fezzan in southwest Libya, and at Melka Konture, along the River Awash in Ethiopia,…

New theory of genomic imprinting

A new paper, A Maternal-Offspring Coadaptation Theory for the Evolution of Genomic Imprinting (open access), presents a theory of genomic imprinting which purports to explain some facets of the phenomenon via maternal-child interaction: Imprinted genes are expressed either from the maternally or paternally inherited copy only, and they play a key role in regulating complex biological processes, including offspring development and mother-offspring interactions. There are several competing theories attempting to explain the evolutionary origin of this monoallelic pattern of gene expression, but…

More than monkey brains

DNA trail points to human brain evolution: A new study comparing the genomes of humans, chimps, monkeys and mice found an unexpectedly high degree of genetic difference in the human DNA regions that influence nerve cell adhesion, compared with the DNA of the other animals. Accelerated evolution here allowed human brain cell connections to form with greater complexity, enabling us to grow bigger brains, the researchers suggest. From the interview with Bruce Lahn: 2. Your work on genes involved in human brain evolution (i.e. ASPM and microcephalin) has focused on amino acid changes. It has been…

Get Ready for the 'Fairness Doctrine' Propaganda: Google Backs Off Net Neutrality

By way of Atrios, we discover that Google has moved away from its pro-net neutrality position: Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same -- nobody is supposed to jump the…

Sunday Sermon: Obama Needs to Make Some Chanage, Not Just Talk About It

Outsourced to The Sideshow: I think I have to disagree with Digby here when she assures me that Obama is lots better than McCain. I mean, yes, I think Obama is lots better than McCain, if only because it's hard to imagine he'd be worse, but: I'm tired of having to make that assumption. I'm tired of just hearing it from his supporters or other Dems who want me to vote for him. Most of all, I'm tired of having to keep saying it to my readers when he keeps doing things that tell me I can't rely on his judgment. He had to be told that voting for Roberts was a bad idea? He actually says out…

Why Don't News Organizations Release Their Polling Data?

I was reading this post about the possible strengths and weaknesses of Clinton and Obama among different demographic groups, and I grew very annoyed. Not at Digby, but the whole debate. What's really frustrating about most voting demographic stories (besides the obvious, which is that they don't have much to do with actual governing) is that I have no way to evaluate the claims made. Sometimes there are bar graphs that show how one group compares to another (blacks vs. whites, old vs. young, etc.). On very rare occasion, there is a two-by-two table, but that's still not enough. If news…

66 Percent of Americans Are "Left of the Left"?

In the ongoing Democratic Party effort to alienate rank-and-file Democrats, along with those non-aligned voters who supported Democrats, an weasel-dick cowardanonymous White House official expressed surprised at the support for the public option (italics mine): "I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether…

Lies, Damn Lies, and Educational Statistics: Can We Even Count Students?

Forget about measuring student outcomes. Can we even measure student numbers? A couple of weeks ago, I started pulling data from the NY Times website that displays the citywide testing scores (I was interested in exploring the relationship between poverty and test scores at a finer resolution than I had previously). Here's the problem: the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) numbers--the ones the federal government uses--and the state numbers don't agree. I'm not referring to educational outcomes: they don't even have the same number of students. Let's look at New York City. The NCLB numbers*…

Annual Roundup: The Return of the Mad Biologist

It's yontif, and we don't blog on yontif, so here are some more highlights from 2009: On Work and Time in Science The Gates Arrest: The Police As an Occupying Forceâ Unscientific America: On Planets and Theories Some More Thoughts About Unscientific America: What Are We Trying to Communicate? So, What Should Scientists Communicate? Egg Donation, Stem Cell Research, and Lady Bits Misunderstanding Palin and 'Palinism': It's the Politics of the Blood A Significant, but Simple, Medical Advance: Hair Sheep Blood Agar Plates Stimulus Package to Cities: Drop Dead? On Scientific Embargoes: What…

WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS!...And Clean Your Stuff

No, not that stuff (well, actually, yes, that stuff too, but I definitely don't want to know about it). One of the important tools in fighting infectious disease is disinfecting surfaces. Which brings me to a recent paper about cruise ships and cleanliness. In June 2006, 43 norovirus outbreaks occurred on thirteen vessels. Noroviruses can cause severe vomitting and diarrhea, and in children, particularly infants, can be deadly (also see Aetiology). In the paper, the authors decided to examine how often bathroom surfaces on cruise ships are cleaned: Methods. Trained health care…

Why We Need Healthcare for All: The Idiocy of Self-Diagnosis

Patients without healthcare make bad self-diagnoses. I'm shocked. The NY Times has a heartbreaking story about people under 30 who can't afford healthcare. It's pretty horrific: juvenile diabetics who have to switch from insulin pumps to injections (which lowers blood sugar control), a woman who went to the emergency room for 46 hours and wound up owing the equivalent of a year of college tuition, and so on (that I can say "and so on", and you can probably come up with your own examples is indictment enough). But this gobsmacked me: Ms. Polec's roommate, Fara D'Aguiar, 26, treated her…

Help teachers!

The scienceblogs crew is pushing a new charity for the next few weeks: an outfit called DonorsChoose, which collects funding requests from teachers and tries to match them up with people willing to pass along a few dollars. They have a long, long list of teachers looking for help in their classrooms; what we sciencebloggers have done is picked a subset of the requests that each of us like and grouped them into a challenge. My challenge contains a dozen science-related requests, and now my job is to beg you, the readers of Pharyngula, to take a look at them and if you can, kick in a few…

Dublin and Cork and Galway and Belfast coming up

It's a busy few days coming up. This afternoon I'm going to record an interview for a show called Culture Shock on Newstalk Radio, which is broadcast on Thursdays at 10pm on 106-108fm. I'll be at UCD tonight at 6:30, in Theatre B in the Science Hub. Tomorrow I hop on a train for Cork, 7pm in Council Chambers Room, 1st floor, North Wing of Main Quadrangle, UCC. I'll be sharing the stage with a representative from Educate Together, and the subject will be on the importance of a secular education. On Thursday, I'll be in Galway, speaking in the O'Flaherty Theatre, NUI Galway, at 6:30 pm. I see…

Christopher Street/Sheridan Square Subway Art 1

tags: Christopher Street, Sheridan Square, The Greenwich Village Murals, subway art, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC Christopher Street/Sheridan Square subway tile art (1 train). Image: GrrlScientist, 27 December 2008 [larger view]. This mural depicts people who were instrumental in establishing the Village, including an early land developer, the publisher of New York's first African-American newspaper, a muralist, and a novelist who immortalized Washington Square -- all gathered around the great arch. I have photographed glass tile mosaic artworks from several NYC subway stations…

Mystery Bird: Great tit, Parus major

tags: Great tit, Parus major, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Great tit, Parus major, photographed in Helsinki, Finland. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: GrrlScientist, 24 November 2008 [larger view]. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Chickadees all look alike: chubby, rather long-tailed little birds with fluffy plumage, big heads, and black-and-white faces. In North America, our chickadees are a colorless lot, only Chestnut-sided straying from…

Mystery Bird: Henslow's Sparrow, Ammodramus henslowii

tags: Henslow's Sparrow, Ammodramus henslowii, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Henslow's Sparrow, Ammodramus henslowii, photographed in Manhattan, Kansas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Dave Rintoul, 2007 [larger view]. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: This is a small, medium-tailed, fat-bodied, big-headed, huge-billed sparrow. And that's probably enough: many birders would be able to identify this bird just from that description without…

TEDTalks: Eric Mead: The Magic of the Placebo

tags: perception, The Magic of the Placebo, placebos, medicine, magic, Eric Mead, TEDTalks, streaming video Sugar pills, injections of nothing -- studies show that, more often than you'd expect, placebos really work. At TEDMED, magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that, even when you know something's not real, you can still react as powerfully as if it is. (Warning: This talk is not suitable for viewers who are disturbed by needles or blood.) What's your opinion? It looked rather contrived to me: The placebo discussion was only remotely related, and seemed only an excuse to perform someï…

TEDTalks: Dan Barber: How I fell in Love with a Fish

tags: fish farming, aquaculture, piscivory, bird sanctuary, foodie, ethical eating, permaculture, agriculture, poverty, hunger, Dan Barber, TEDTalks, streaming video Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain. My one complaint about this video is that the speaker never once identifies either of…

I Get Books ..

I receive a fair number of books to review each month, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog. Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds by Olivia Gentile (Bloomsbury USA; 2009). Review copy. Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2009). Review copy. Shark by Dean Crawford (Reaktion Books; 2008). Review…

Barbarism in Poland

Pedophiles are wretched people who abuse the helpless, and they get no sympathy from me. However, they are still people — sick people, damaged people, often abused people, sometimes psychopathic people. They have to be treated with due process and concern — we want to end the behavior, not the individual. So now Poland has passed a law requiring mandatory chemical castration for pedophiles. That's a frightening prospect, not just because it's a punishment that can and will be abused — who judged Alan Turing but the state? — and the attitudes behind it are even worse. Prime Minister Donald…

Lab Trash

tags: Lab Trash, recycle, molecular biology, cell biology, streaming video I've been telling you about the perils of plastics, but some of the worst plastics offenders are molecular and cell biologists. Nearly every experiment that we do uses incredible amounts of plastics. In cell biology or molecular biology labs the emphasis is on working sterile, quickly and reproducibly. So companies have been selling all these incredibly useful products to life science labs: sterile plastic tubes of all shapes and sizes, single wrap multi-well tissue culture plates, sterile plastic dishes, sterile…

Antarctica: Others Think I'd do a Helluva Job, Too

Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter, I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of themselves and write an essay explaining why we think we are the best choice, and solicit votes from the public. Whomever receives the most votes wins…

UN Declaration of Human Rights in audiobook form

[NB: This is a companion to today's post on the Tripoli 6] Yesterday (October 24) was United Nations Day. Thanks to BoingBoing we were alerted that Librivox, an organization devoted to making available US Public Domain recordings, has an audiobook of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 21 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Afrikaans, English and Esperanto. It is almost 60 years since the UN General Assembly ratified the Declaration in the wake of Nazi atrocities before and during WWII. It was meant to clarify the UN charter on matters of human rights and to emphasize their…

Sharing Data Visualization Methods Across Disciplines

Below, Michelle Borkin answers the second of our three questions. I think every field is ripe for cross-disciplinary research, but in particular fields that share common broad problems or challenges. For example, with data visualization the specific field of science might be different but the visualization requirements can be very similar. In this case, techniques developed to visualize data in one field can be applied to another field. I have worked for the past few years on one such interdisciplinary collaboration, the Astronomical Medicine project where astronomers and radiologists have…

Friday Fun: Orientation-a-palooza!

Yeah, it's frosh orientation here at York U starting today so I thought I'd celebrate that with links to a bunch of posts from my all-time favourite source of higher education satire, The Cronk of Higher Ed! International Helium Shortage Leads to Massive Orientation Layoffs “After we realized how much time our orientation leaders spent blowing up and delivering balloons, we realized we’d have to cut 40 percent of our staff,” said Lisa Brandberg, assistant director of transition programs at Cal State Yorba-Linda. “We tried to create alternate assignments, like sidewalk chalking or poster…

Around the Web: Why Twitter matters, Using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities and more

Why Twitter Matters: Tomorrow’s Knowledge Network Available now: a guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities If you don’t have social media, you are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risks isolating others Twitter: My go-to learning network How Will MOOCs Make Money? Not Free, Not Easy, Not Trivial — The Warehousing and Delivery of Digital Goods University Students Are Unaware of the Role of Academic Librarians Patrick Nielsen Hayden Explains eBook Territorial Rights For You The Publishing Buffet: An open-access journal with an…

Around the Web: Debating the NYPL renovation, Journal editor ethics and more

Loud Debate Rages Over N.Y. Library's Quiet Stacks Shh! Scholars Fight Over Library Plan (more on NYPL renovation plans) Editors With Ethics One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Report on the Experiences of First Respondents to the Digging Into Data Challenge Disintermediating preservation Amazon’s markup of digital delivery to indie authors is ~129,000% What's Right With Publishing Business Schools: Who Are Your Competitors? Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills An Open Letter to the Guys…

Friday Fun: Remembering Ray Bradbury

This past week one of the true giants of fantastic literature died: Ray Bradbury. I like what Gregory Benford had to say on the Tor.com blog: Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings. By writing of futures that echo our nostalgias, Bradbury reminds us of both what we were and of what we could yet be. Like most creative people, he was still a child at heart. His stories tell us: Hold on to your childhood. You don’t get another one. In so many stories, he gave us his childhood—and it…

Friday Fun: Lord of the Tweets

Sure, John Scalzi doesn't need any link love from me. On the other hand, sometimes he just hits one right out of the park. Apparently the other day he stumbled upon a Lord of the Rings trilogy showing on TV. And he had a web-enabled machine of some sort handy. And he had Twitter open. Hilarity ensued. Of the highest order. Lord of the Tweets it is! Here's a samplling, but please do drop by Scalzi's blog and check out his complete rundown of tweets. OSHA clearly has no jurisdiction in Moria. I am suddenly aware of just how little difference there is between Orlando Bloom's Legolas and…

Friday Fun: Last American Who Knew What The Hell He Was Doing Dies

Leave it to The Onion to put it all into perspective. A couple of articles on Wednesday's passing of Steve Jobs. Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies CUPERTINO, CA--Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. "We haven't just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we've literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on," a statement from President Barack Obama read in part…

Innovation & asking the right questions

In all of our organizations fostering innovation is an important goal. But how do you turn the innovation fawcett on? Somehow it seems so much easier to turn it off. Of course, it's all about institutional culture. The way problems and solutions are framed. The way management/leadership/peer culture frames, encourages and rewards ideas. Sometimes it just the way we ask questions about new ideas. A nice articles from Tony Golsby-Smith at the Harvard Business Review blog site: Three Questions that Will Kill Innovation. They're mostly aimed at commercial organizations but can easily be re-…

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, Winter 2011

As usual, a bunch of great new articles from the most recent ISTL! Five Years Later: Predicting Student Use of Journals in a New Water Resources Graduate Program by Andrea A. Wirth and Margaret Mellinger, Oregon State University Seeing the Forest of Information for the Trees of Papers: An Information Literacy Case Study in a Geography/Geology Class by Linda Blake and Tim Warner, West Virginia University Local Citation Analysis of Graduate Biology Theses: Collection Development Implications by Laura Newton Miller, Carleton University Career Motivations of the Scientist-Turned-Librarian: A…

Best Science Books 2010: The Australian, The Independent, January Magazine and Page One Book

Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. The Australian Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer The Independent Bad Ideas?: An arresting history of our inventions: How Our Finest Inventions Nearly Finished Us Off by Robert M. L. Winston Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society: 350 Years of the Royal Society and Scientific Endeavour by Bill Bryson January Magazine Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby Here's Looking at Euclid: A…

Quick Picks on Science Blogs, August 12

A few tender morsels of readability to get your weekend started out right: "Creationist Turkey should not be let into the EU!" "The headline says, Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds, but here is the money shot: 'The only country included in the study where adults were more likely than Americans to reject evolution was Turkey.'" "A day at the Stevens County Fair" PZ goes to the county fair and posts his pictures so you can vicariously experience every display there! From beasts to vegetables to a big blue machine which may or may not be a Swine Fecal…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, July 27

"Compared To Your Pet Iguana, You Are Practically Blind" How poorly do mammals see? More poorly than we ever could have imagined before discovering melanopsin. Visial photoreception is only the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of complexity: "A Simple Story Gets Complicated" Promiscuity in some individuals (we're talking about voles, here) is not as elegantly accounted for by genetics as we once thought. "Somewhat Less Gleeful Gleevec" Gleevec, a drug for chronic myelogenous leukemia, hit the market in 2001, and was welcomed as the harbinger of a new generation of cancer treatments. Now it's…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, July 17

It's an embarrassment of riches on ScienceBlogs today. Below, your quick guide to a few of the posts that are making us feel so flush. Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair links to an article about the portrayal of physicists in film, and talks up the Society for Arts, Literature, and Science, which is planning an interesting annual meeting in NYC in November (the theme is "Evolution: Biological, Cultural, and Cosmic"). On the subject of The World's Fair (those guys are on fire), the third and final clue to the Puzzle Fantastica #1 is up. Shelley has posted an intriguing bid for a solution the…

Around the Web: 16 recent reports relevant to higher education, libraries and librarianship

I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments. I did a similar compendium about a month ago here. NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition Technology to the Rescue: Can Technology-Enhanced Education Help Public Flagship Universities Meet Their Challenges? Policy…

More Weizmann History

Here's another article we came across while editing material on the still-theoretical new website. Unfortunately, the article is more about the photographer than Anna Weizmann, herself. Prof. Anna Weizmann was Chaim's younger sister, (there were a dozen brothers and sisters, all of them chemists, engineers and doctors). She was also one of the original 11 scientists (3 of whom were women) at what was then the Daniel Sieff Research Institute (est. 1934). She never married, (one article she co-authored referred to her as Miss Anna Weizmann) and she ran Dr. Chaim Weizmann's lab after his…

Warning: GMO

Just read some of the comments on Amy Harmon's #GMO labeling story from Friday's NYT. Guess people care about this topic. Here are some excerpts: "Unless you are foraging, eating wild-berries, game, etc... then you are consuming GMO food. There is no logical definition of #GMO food" "Conservatives deny data on global warming; Liberals deny data on #GMO safety Each side discards reason when it doesn't suit their politics" "The FDA should require stringent testing of GMO products and label only those found to be harmful" "You think you have pesticides being applied now? Wait until the demise of…

Baboons, breast cancer and blogs.

I was so pleased to have a chance to take part in the Women in Science Symposium at Cornell April 2-3. Thanks to the Cornell faculty and students that put together this wonderful event. For those that could not attend, read the graduate student interviews with the speakers here. Dr. Mary Power is director of the Angelo Coast Reserve, leader in scientific societies, mentor to many successful students, and as an influential figure in several environmental policy debates. Dr. Sharon Long is member of National Academy of Sciences and served as science advisor to President Obama during his…

Congratulation to our student champions, Malinee and Merry

Merry Mou won first place in the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship. 700 to 900 students participate with their research projects in a variety of categories, including physics, biology, and computer science. Winners are chosen to go on to state and national competitions. Merry Mou won 1st place in Botany in the 2010 Championship for her project, Phenotypic and Genotypic Analyses of Oryza Sativa T-DNA Lines, which was completed in the summer of 2010 as part of the Young Scholars Program under the guidance of postdoctoral fellow Manoj Sharma. She will be participating…

OSU Cans Primate Research

A raging ERV says we could see this coming in April, when the wife of 400-million-dollar contributor T. Boone Pickens wanted to bar the veterinary school at Oklahoma State University from receiving funds. Ms. Pickens cited the cruel treatment of dogs—doomed shelter animals who were apparently appeased with cheeseburgers before being operated on and euthanized. Now, a proposed "ethics panel approved, NIH funded" anthrax vaccine project using baboons as test subjects has been canceled by the school president. "WTF?" wonders ERV. DrugMonkey also gets up in arms, writing that the NIH is "the…

The Buzz: New Twists on the Double Helix

Forget fashion; when it comes to expressing yourself, it's your genes that wear you! On Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong discusses the explosive evolution of AEM genes in humans and elephants—two long-lived, social animals with "very, very large brains." Big brains need more juice to function, and AEM genes, which govern how mitochondria metabolize food energy, may be a key to evolving intelligence. On Gene Expression, Razib Khan explores the links between gene transmission and language transmission, writing that "linguistic affinity" could modulate gene flow, and vice versa. On Mike…

The Buzz: Beauty and the Dismal Science

Can the elegant models of mathematics and physics be applied to something so intrinsically complicated as the economic behavior of individuals? When economist Paul Krugman argued in The New York Times Magazine last week that the failure of economists to predict the current economic crisis was due to their reliance on beautiful but flawed models of perfect markets, mathematician and hedge fund manager Eric Weinstein immediately tweeted his disagreement, asking ScienceBloggers Chad Orzel and Dave Bacon for their takes as well. Chad brought his experience with physics to bear, while Dave…

The Buzz: The Truth About Lying

Why do some people lie much more frequently than others? A new study in PNAS indicates that consistently honest people don't have to struggle to overcome temptation—they simply don't feel it. Psychologists at Harvard scanned the brains of 35 volunteers while they predicted the outcome of a computerized coin toss game for money. In one trial, lying about their prediction after seeing the outcome could increase the total earned; in a second trial, all the volunteers were forced to tell the truth by calling the coin before the toss. By studying each person's reported predictions from both…