Via Dienekes this paper about the distribution of the Genghiside patrilineage amongst Eurasian peoples: …The highest frequency of haplotypes from the cluster of the Genghis Khan’s descendants was found in Mongols (34.8%). In Russia, this cluster was found in Altaian Kazakhs (8.3%), Altaians (3.4%), Buryats (2.3%), Tyvans (1.9%), and Kalmyks (1.7%). It is no surprise […]

Terence Tao is a 2006 recipient of the Fields Medal. He scored a 760 on the SAT-Math at the age of 8 and reportedly has an IQ exceeding 220. He is probably best known for proving the Green-Tao Theorem: It is always possible to find, somewhere in the infinity of integers, a progression of prime […]

Morgan Sheng and Casper Hoogenraad just published a through review of recent attempts to understand the synapse at a quantitative level using mass spectrometry and electron microscopy. The focus is on the receiving end of synaptic transmission (the post-synapse). There is a highly organized, disc-shaped protein architecture just inside the post-synaptic side of a synapse […]

The Economist has an article up about the revival of Confucianism in China. There has been a lot of talk about Christianity & Christianesque cults in China over the past 15 years (see Jesus in Beijing). It seems plausible that ~5% of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China are now Christian or Christianesque, […]

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Philip Jenkins‘ God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis is a very good book. In fact, I recommend anyone interested in Islam & Europe to buy it and read it! It is dense on data and citation, and the narrative benefits from the author’s multi-faceted understanding of the history and development of religions and […]

Cultural hitchhiking on the wave of advance of beneficial technologies: …Decoupling of the advantageous trait from other “hitchhiking” traits depends on its adoption by the preexisting population. Here, we adopt a similar wave-of-advance model based on food production on a heterogeneous landscape with multiple populations. Two key results arise from geographic inhomogeneity: the “subsistence boundary,” […]

Martin mulls over the question, Are Humans Polygamous? There is lots of interesting discussion, with a FinnXPer & reindeer lover in the fray. I think part of the confusion here is simply semantical. Cultural anthropologists often tend to define an -ogamy based on the preferred ideal within a society. So you have circumstances where the […]

Retrospectacle gives the low-down on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which measures the pain of insect stings. The winner is the Bullet Ant that plays a central role in boy-to-man initiation rites of the Satere-Mawe tribe in Amazonia, as seen in this video. Returning to my post on daredevils, one episode of Jackass spin-off Wildboyz […]

A few months ago, I wondered out loud if next-generation sequencing techniques would render microarrays obsolete. There’s no need to estimate abundances of any nucleic acid by hybridization if you can just count up frequences of mRNAs or DNA or whatever directly via sequencing. I must have heard that idea somewhere, because this week’s Cell […]

Origins of major human infectious diseases: Many of the major human infectious diseases, including some now confined to humans and absent from animals, are ‘new’ ones that arose only after the origins of agriculture. Where did they come from? Why are they overwhelmingly of Old World origins? Here we show that answers to these questions […]

The Benefits of Bee-ing Social: By measuring how much of each solution it took to stop the staph’s growth, the researchers determined the strength of each kind of bee’s body coating. All the coatings killed bacteria, but the social bees’ antimicrobials proved much more powerful than expected, says Stow. Antimicrobial armor from the most social […]

I realize I’m sort of beating a dead horse by reporting every single high-profile genome-wide association scan (for example), but it’s worth pointing out their successes, as there was serious opposition to the HapMap project that laid the groundwork for these studies. So in that spirit, I’ll point out this paper, which identifies a common […]

Check this paper, which shows a latent herpesvirus infection confers resistance to bacterial infections in a mouse model: All humans become infected with multiple herpesviruses during childhood. After clearance of acute infection, herpesviruses enter a dormant state known as latency. Latency persists for the life of the host and is presumed to be parasitic, as […]

Remember back in the late 90s when there were all those “countdown to legality” websites? Well, take note, Jacques Barzun, author of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present, will be turning 100 on November 30th of this year! In homage to Barzun’s centenary you will note to […]

Continuing the series on the maintenance of variation in human height, let’s have a look at how comedians measure up. (See the previous entry in the series here, which has links to the other entries.) I could see their heights go either way: maybe they’re shorter than average, and their comedy routine is their way […]

We all know that homo economicus fails as a complete description of human behavior, as the new field of behavioral economics makes abundantly clear. So while the homo economicus model does a good job explaining things like the interaction of supply and demand, the random walk nature of stock prices, and photo #16, it misses […]

Here is something that caught my eye over at PLoS ONE: Most birds have simple genitalia; males lack external genitalia and females have simple vaginas. However, male waterfowl have a phallus whose length (1.5-40 cm) and morphological elaborations vary among species and are positively correlated with the frequency of forced extra-pair copulations among waterfowl species. […]

The New York Times has a piece which goes over the issue of genetic testing and abortion. Most of the coverage is given over to people who support abortion rights but are not particularly happy about the consequences of the rhetoric of “choice.” I’m not old enough to remember, but does this airing of “concerns” […]