Twins separated at sport
The Shortcuts Blog discusses British runner Mo Farah, his identical twin Hassan, the heritability of extreme performance: "Could Mo Farah's talent have run in the family?". The twins were raised apart...
View ArticleAcademic stultification
My University of Wisconsin colleague, the historian Bill Cronon has a recent essay that asks why, if history is so interesting to the public, "professional" historians are so boring: "Professional...
View ArticleHuman evolution links for teachers
As the new school year ramps up, if you are teaching human evolution as part of your courses, Caitlin Schrein has been tweeting some helpful resource links. Her post from last year, "Human Evolution...
View ArticleDead Marshes in Denmark
ScienceNordic describes an incredible Iron Age archaeological dig in Denmark: "An entire army sacrificed in a bog". Archaeologists have spent all summer excavating a small sample of what has turned...
View ArticleTomoko Ohta profile
Current Biology has published an interview of the esteemed Japanese population geneticist Tomoko Ohta [1]. But, you chose not to stay in the US? I was a Fulbright student, and four years was the...
View ArticleOutsourcing research
Richard F. Wintle describes his job coordinating grant-seeking and laboratory work in a Canadian research institute: "The unsung heroes behind those big genomics breakthroughs". The subheadline is...
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When and where was proto-Indo-European?
Synopsis: A new paper places the origin of Indo-European in Anatolia, but the story may be more complex.A new study by Remco Bouckaert and colleagues attempts to place the origin of Indo-European...
View ArticleBodies in art, art in bodies
Ewen Callaway compares two exhibits that feature animal anatomy in prominent ways [1]. "Animals Inside Out", at the Natural History Museum, London, features the work of German anatomist Gunther von...
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The grantest generation
A sobering chart: The red lines are the distribution of ages of medical school faculties, in 1980 and 2010; the bars are the distribution of NIH grant recipient ages. Both increased markedly in the...
View ArticleAttitudes about online course materials versus online research publication
Steve Kolowich reports on a survey of faculty attitudes about the use of online and electronic resources: "Digital Faculty: Professors and Technology, 2012". An interesting aspect of the survey is that...
View ArticleGrasping the genomic palantir
Synopsis: What to do when you discover your anonymous research subject is going to die?Gina Kolata writes in the New York Times about the conundrum faced by research scientists who inadvertently...
View Article"We find it hard to see what publication would achieve at this stage"
Theoretical physicist Terry Rudolph shares a story about preprints and the editorial process at a top science journal: "Guest Post: Terry Rudolph on Nature versus Nurture". In short, there was no...
View ArticleNSF 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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