This Slate piece by David Plotz was pretty enjoyable in my opinion. Plotz highlights possible reasons why South Korea seems to be punching above its weight class in terms of human bioscience. He points to three primary factors: Lack of moral debate in regards to the ethics of the enterprise Brute force work hours A […]

De novo discovery of a tissue-specific gene regulatory module in a chordate. You can read the full paper (you should read the full paper).

Based on Body Size, Bacteria and Elephants Have Similar Metabolism, Ecologists FindUCR-led research team shows that organisms use their biochemical characteristics to overcome limitations arising from their body size “The researchers’ analysis also shows that the rate of energy consumption per unit body mass declines with growing body size in groups of evolutionarily close organisms, […]

I wanted to post a rejoinder to the avian flu discussion below. My response is to point out that pandemic flu need not kill very many people to have an enormous impact on our lives. A Canadian investment firm issued a report on avian flu recently. They argue that the indirect (economic) effects of a […]

The Geographic Spread of the CCR5 Δ32 HIV-Resistance Allele. A picture is worth a lot of words, so…. Note the appeal to the “wave of advance” model of R.A. Fisher, you’ve seen it before in reference to the possibility of advantageous alleles spreading throughout populations via selection without concomitant wholesale demographic dislocations and migrations. The […]

For a long time now I have been meaning to post my thoughts on what I see as overhyping the avian flu situation. Luckily, a reader of Instapundit beat me to it and summed up nicely a lot of my thoughts. As a medical researcher, I want to make a gentle but sincere plea to […]

The beauty of capitalism is that market niches are always being identified. You know those breast implants woman are getting, well they’re so unitary in purpose just hanging there on display. Wouldn’t it be better to implant an MP3 player into one breast and the music collection into the other? Computer chips that store music […]

The New York Times Magazine queries – is an inch Worth $100,000? (The Short of it). I guess that depends where it goes . . . Down the toilet is where, apparently, according to the article, which describes the modern trend for parents and doctors to favor expensive Human Growth Hormone treatment for young boys […]

Have you ever been stuck in phone-mail hell? If you hit “0″ you’ll often bypass the tree, but not always. Here’s a master list, published by Intuit Quickbase, covering many of the largest companies.

Just wanted to pass along some links to what will likely be a controversy when Steven Speilberg releases his film Munich later this year. The film tells the tale of an Israeli covert counter terrorist squad that was tasked with assassinating the Black September terrorists that were still at large. The tale has been told […]

Meet the Puberty Pals and your host, Paulie the Penis, as they guide you through the physical changes associated with puberty. Definitely not work-safe.

Here is the link to the Flores paper. It seems open to the public. Update: If you can’t access it, it is in gnxp forum files as “flores.”

A few weeks ago I posted something titled I am a believer which disturbed some readers. Subsequently I had a conversation with Michael Vassar where he communicated to me that he thought most of science was wrong. Actually, I concurred (we both agreed physics was pretty accurate, but the action today is mostly in the […]

You don’t have to be mad to be a parent, but it helps. This is certainly not an original thought but it’s a truism nonetheless. Recent research is aiming to expand our insight into how parental behavior changes when children are introduced into their lives. Dr. James Leckman of the Yale University School of Medicine […]

Since we’ve talked about height on this blog before, I thought the following might interest some…from The Aegean Bronze Age: All the large samples have produced very similar averages of height…around 1.67 m [about 5'6] for men and 1.55 m [about 5'1] for women, but with a range that in both sexes spreads over 20 […]

This isn’t big news, but confirmation of a somewhat amusing trend, Emergence of Young Human Genes after a Burst of Retroposition in Primates: …We estimate that at least one new retrogene per million years emerged on the human lineage during the past ∼63 million years of primate evolution. Detailed analysis of a subset of the […]

Carl posts about the new Hobbit finds. John has a short comment (more tomorrow says he). Update: John’s update is up.

(Jason Malloy provided this interesting link in the GNXP Forum) Smarter on Drugs “Just as Ritalin can improve the academic performance of hyperactive children, it can do the same for normal children. It is commonly thought to boost SAT scores by more than 100 points, for both the hyperactive and the normal user. Many healthy […]

From wild wolf to domestic dog: gene expression changes in the brain: Despite the relatively recent divergence time between domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and gray wolves (Canis lupus), the two species show remarkable behavioral differences. Since dogs and wolves are nearly identical at the level of DNA sequence, we hypothesize that the two species may […]

This post is really just a short addendum to David’s post. He offered that perhaps there are 5 loci that control skin color in humans. Well, it’s more complicated than that I suspect, but let’s assume there are 6 loci. I’m going to present a super simple model to illustrate what I think is part […]