NSF changes Biological Anthropology program deadlines
Synopsis: A Q and A with NSF Biological Anthropology program director, Carolyn EhardtMany of my readers who are biological anthropologists at the faculty or graduate level were surprised earlier this...
View ArticleDenisova at high coverage
Synopsis: A technological advance in library preparation gives rise to much better knowledge of the ancient DenisovansScience today has released the new paper on the Denisova high-coverage genome by...
View ArticleImmediate publishing
Michael Eisen: "The Glacial Pace of Change in Scientific Publishing". Consider that most papers submitted to journals last November 26th have still not been published. That’s not a random date – it...
View ArticleThe fused chromosome 2 was in Denisova
In my post on the new Denisova paper the other day ("Denisova at high coverage"), I forgot to mention one interesting detail in the new paper by Mattias Meyer and colleagues [1]. Sometime in our...
View ArticleChomping Chomsky
I ran into Deevy Bishop's review of a recent book by Noam Chomsky and James McGilvray, titled The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray. As someone who works on child language disorders,...
View ArticleWithout the code, it's hand-waving
A new post by C. Titus Brown is worth reading: "Anecdotal science" I'm starting to notice that a lot of bioinformatics is anecdotal. People publish software that "works for them." But it's not clear...
View ArticleThe ENCODE project and function in the human genome
Synopsis: A giant project for cataloguing functional gene variation publishes its results.I wanted to find out more about today's publication of the ENCODE catalog and data, and so I turned right away...
View Article"We're not, as a whole, introspective"
The Guardian has a profile of the "inventor of the pill", who in his later years has turned to fiction as a novelist and playwright: "Carl Djerassi: 'Scientists aren't just Frankensteins or...
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Gibraltar
I've arrived in Gibraltar and am settling down after a fairly long travel. Here's the view to the west toward the Strait. I'm here for the Calpé conference on "The Human Niche", and hopefully I'll be...
View ArticleBuilding bigger dolphin brains
Ed Yong reports on a new study demonstrating a history of positive selection on the gene ASPM in cetaceans. Bruce Lahn's group previously showed that this gene has been positively selected in primate...
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