No more gene patents
This is a surprise: The U.S. federal government's position now opposes gene patents: The new position was declared in a brief filed late Friday by the Justice Department in relation to a lawsuit...
View ArticleCopy number variation in 1000 Genomes
When I wrote earlier in the week about the 1000 Genomes Project results, I mentioned that a second paper was being published in Science. That paper, by Peter Sudmant and colleagues [1], works to...
View ArticleBattlestar mitochondria
Wired has an interview with the authors of a book titled, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. I wasn't a viewer of the show, so I wasn't aware that the mitochondrial Eve scenario turned out to be a...
View ArticleGenomes unzipped, ancestry revealed
Last week I linked to Genomes Unzipped participant Joe Pickrell ("Ancestry unzipped"), who was working through the ancestry calculations that made his genome appear to have been partially Ashkenazi...
View ArticleMitochondrial catchphrases
I love the first day of the month, because my web stats update at 3:00 am, giving me a more or less random midnight slice of my visitors. Over a longer time, the pages and search terms sort themselves...
View ArticleWhat is the human mutation rate?
Last spring I wrote about a study that used whole-genome comparisons between parents and offspring to estimate the rate of per-genome mutation in humans ("A low human mutation rate may throw everything...
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 5
Headline from the Telegraph: Neanderthals really were sex-obsessed thugs Uhhh..."So easy a caveman could do it?"
View ArticleHeyerdahl hyperdiffusion
Martin Rundkvist has been giving a series of lectures about pseudoarchaeologists. Today he writes about Thor Heyerdahl, setting his ideas into the mid-20th-century diffusionist-evolutionist axis:...
View ArticleKoro in the Aka
I was talking about language dispersals today, and so this piece by Nigel Williams in Current Biology is topical: "New language found". The article describes the "discovery" (by linguists) of a...
View ArticleGive me a letter
Razib, pointing to others' worries about Facebook and privacy, scores an interesting historical analogy: On the last point, many ancient letter writers behaved as if they were posting on a Facebook...
View ArticleQuote: Boyle on progress
Alan Boyle: When it comes to scientific advances, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
View ArticleNeandertal anti-defamation files, 6
From The Simpsons: BART: (in front of class, points to Homer in Neandertal costume) Behold, Neanderthal man, our ugliest, stupidest ancestor. (Kids laugh) BART: Come on, missing link, put on a show....
View ArticleIguanodoubt
Darren Naish has written a nice discussion of the taxonomic difficulties of Iguanodon. It's a guest post at the Scientific American blog. Dinosaurs and hominins seem to be the most prominent cases...
View ArticleQuote: John Lachs on blogging
From a piece in The Tennesseean, worthy of a place in the Onion except it's apparently serious: "Internet bloggers’ uncrafted output completely self-serving" Some bloggers act like literary versions of...
View ArticleCutmarked bones from Dikika critiqued
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovid bones from Dikika bear cutmarks made by...
View ArticlePublic engagement
Nature's Gene Russo has a nice article this week about scientists' attitudes toward colleagues who do lots of public outreach: "Outreach: Meet the press". Although some young scientists embrace media...
View ArticleQuote: Penn Gillette on freedom
Penn Gillette, writing in 2002 about an experience with a TSA "pat-down": Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to...
View ArticleMorris Goodman obituary
A reader forwards the news that Morris Goodman has died. Goodman was among the first to demonstrate molecular similarity between humans and chimpanzees; he became a strong advocate for simplifying the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sketchbook
Today's sketchbook: 2B/4B pencil sketch of a photo by Edward S. Curtis, "A Pomo girl".
View ArticleBadger affection
We're all about the badgers here in Wisconsin. The "badger" nickname came to the state because of miners who came to Southwestern Wisconsin to dig lead -- "badgers" being a term for these folks who dug...
View Article