High school genomics
Ronald Bailey writes in the January Reason about his experiences with personal genomics ("I’ll Show You My Genome. Will You Show Me Yours?"). He's a booster, and much of the article is a review of...
View ArticleAmelia news
More news about Amelia Earhart: The suspected finger is being tested for human DNA. It may turn out to be from a turtle – which have similar bones in their flippers. But the other discoveries lend...
View ArticleCulturomics
From the Guardian: "Google creates a tool to probe 'genome' of English words for cultural trends". "Interest in computational approaches to the humanities and social sciences dates back to the 1950s,"...
View ArticleOpen data genomics
Nature this week carries a story by Ewen Callaway titled, "The rise of the genome bloggers". The main subject is Dienekes Pontikos, whose "Dodecad Ancestry Project" seeks to illuminate population...
View ArticleSports and genetics
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental has an interview with Peter Vint of the U.S. Olympic Committee: "Do Young Athletes Need Practice Or Genetics? A Conversation With Peter Vint". Vint does a good job of...
View ArticleNeandertal band of brothers
Carles Lalueza-Fox and colleagues [1] have a new analysis of the mitochondrial DNA from El Sidrón, Spain. The site has a minimum number of 12 Neandertal specimens, dating to 49,000 years ago. The...
View ArticleThe Denisova genome FAQ
Today, a paper by David Reich and colleagues presents the nuclear genome of the Denisova pinky bone [1]. This is the second “whole genome” of an apparently extinct population of Pleistocene humans....
View ArticlePeerless critiques
Nature last week posted an open access editorial, "Response required", on the need for authors of high-profile papers to engage with online commentary on blogs and other forums. The arsenate bacteria...
View ArticleWays of exploring
Glendon Mellow of the Flying Trilobite ruminates on the purposes of scientific art in a guest post at Scientific American: "Scientific accuracy in art". Out of the post, I really like his twist on...
View ArticleMerry Christmas
Razib's post, "The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm", is a personal remembrance of the modern human origins problem, from his perspective. It includes many kind words about me and some very...
View ArticlePod pimping
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week author Matt Wedel has two recent posts about the artistic reconstruction of sauropods. The one about head anatomy is especially perceptive. I think these are...
View ArticleGenes and drugs
Nature Reviews Genetics this month has published a panel conversation between five experts on pharmacogenomics [1]. If you're interested in the way that people are addressing research on gene-drug...
View ArticleWorm me up
Robin Ann Smith contributed a guest post to Scientific American, titled "The worms within". The main idea is that the immune system evolved to deal with parasitic worms, and some evidence suggests that...
View ArticleThe long tail
Do texts and tweets "change the nature of in-depth analysis"? Wired commentator Clive Thompson thinks so, because they take away the impetus for "middle-form" reporting, which alerts readers to an...
View ArticleModern hairshirts
John Horgan writes "Why A.D. 2011 beats 100,000 B.C.: More choices, free will, freedom". I would have thought it was simpler: "Fewer dead babies, most people have long lives, less starvation". But I'll...
View ArticleTartar control and Neandertal plant use
Dental plaque is a biofilm made up of bacteria adhering to the enamel surface of the teeth. Plaque is soft but over many days can gradually calcify. The hardened plaque, called calculus (or dental...
View ArticleOn Wisconsin
The University of Wisconsin is at the top of the rankings when it comes to internet "brand equity": What's internet brand equity? It's a measure of who's talking about you online, based on Internet...
View ArticleHobbit DNA hunt
Every so often, a reader asks me if I know any new rumors about DNA sampling of "Homo floresiensis". I'm not holding out much hope for success given the tropical location and past failure, but with new...
View ArticleField notes
The NY Times' "Notes from the field" feature is following paleobotanist Bonnie Jacobs, working a fossil field locality in the Mush Valley of Ethiopia: None of us has ever experienced a site like this....
View ArticleDenisova FOXP2 status
In the Denisova hubbub last month ("Denisova genome FAQ") I didn't hear anyone talking about the FOXP2 sequence of the Denisovans. I can't swear that the paper and supplement [1] don't discuss the gene...
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