I enjoyed this review of The Sushi Economy, mainly because I was fully unaware of the fact that there are people referred to as “tuna barons”. Apparently they’re Australian aquaculturists that have made a killing on the rising popularity of sushi. It doesn’t have quite the ring of “oil baron”, but hey, you take what […]

An FOB (friend of the blog) has a prescription for how you can be proactive if you are a restrictionist and want to affect the pending senatorial proceedings. According to Krikorian and Kaus, these are the 12 Senators on the fence (there may be more). Perhaps you could post this list with the following directions. […]

I was having a discussion with a friend last month about the effect of religious belief on morality. My own hunch was that all things controlled religion makes a minimal impact upon average life time behavior. Rather, I suspected that religious beliefs tended to increase the amplitude of fluctuation between being “good” and “bad.” Religion […]

John Brockman is repackaging his “What is your dangerous idea?” question from 2006 into a book. Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, probably the two brightest lights in the firmament of Brockman’s stable, have written a preface and afterward for the book. You can read them online. Dawkins in particular touched on a subject which might […]

In Feburary, a little “Education Forum” article in Science analysed quite a bit of data to come to the conclusion that standardized test scores are a good predictor of a number of measures of success in graduate school. Check the article for the actual numbers– there are quite high (~0.4) correlations between various test scores […]

Pamela Anderson To Open A Chain Of Strip Clubs?: She writes on her website: “I thought of a great way to celebrate my Finnish heritage at home. I’m going to look into opening a chain of strip clubs and I’ll call them Lapland!” Labels: Finn baiting

Appropriately enough, considering some recent conversations here, AlDaily links to an interesting article in New York Magazine on the biology of human sexuality. The concept of natural variation was apparently quite the shock to the field: “The brain was considered pretty hardwired,” says Roger Gorski, a neurobiologist at UCLA who researches sexual differentiation. “It was […]

A recent article in Nature, which we blogged about here, reviewed the consequences of agriculture on the nature and prevalence of pathogens that have plagued human beings. One key datum that Wolfe et al. (2007) discuss is the difference between the vectors (or transmitters) of infectious disease in the tropical vs. non-tropical regions, where agriculture […]

Eye on DNA links to this online paternity calculator, which takes into account blood group, eye color, and earlobe type to determine whether a guy’s traits are consistent with paternity. Kind of cool. Someone actually asked me whether this was possible the other day, and the earlobes thing was the only one I could come […]

RNA interference is a process by which small (20-22 nt) RNAs bind to a fully or partially complementary messenger RNA and reduce the amount of protein product from that mRNA. The general rule is that if the match is perfect (full complementarity) then the target mRNA is cut into two pieces and destroyed forthwith. If […]

I know this isn’t the Learn Japanese forum, but when I have time for playing around I’ve been enjoying this Final Fantasy / Zelda takeoff that helps you with katakana, hiragana, and some kanji. It is called Slime Forest. The slimes attack and yell characters at you to which you must respond appropriately. Save the […]

Part three of the “genetics and race” debate in the pages of The New Republic is up. One point the debaters seem to have oddly fixated on is the racial disparity in the prevalence of hypertension– for those of you unaware, African-Americans have higher rates and more extreme forms of the disease. The debaters at […]

A New Approach for Using Genome Scans to Detect Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome The evolution of new functions and adaptation to new environments occurs by positive selection, whereby beneficial mutations increase in frequency and eventually become fixed in a population. Detecting such selection in humans is crucial for understanding the importance of […]

The Etruscan origin story is now in the news again after the lead researcher presented his findings that these ancient people show strong evidence of a genetic affinity with Anatolians at a conference. I put a quick round up over at ScienceBlogs, but this piece in the LA Times is a bit disconcerting. Here are […]

Math textbooks should teach the student the material, and how to think mathematically, as soon as possible and with the least amount of work as possible. If we view learning math as learning classical piano, we’d want a tutorial that clearly walked us through the basics and showed us the guts of a piece of […]

The New York Times Magazine has a piece up about Robert Putnam’s work which shows that ethnic & racial diversity decreases trust, not just between groups but between and individual and society as a whole. Labels: race

Gene bashing – dilemma of black geneticists working on the National Institute of Health’s Human Genome Project: “I don’t fear science. The [development of the] wheel, fire and aircraft have done a considerable amount of harm…far more than genetic research is likely to do,” Bowman says. Anyway, he adds, “we are already in a eugenic […]

Many evolutionary biologists are content to focus on large-scale trends in evolution– they debate whether protein-coding or regulatory changes are more important in adaptive evolution, or look to compare the numbers of genes undergoing selection in different lineages. To each their own, of course, but I find those sorts of questions unsatisfying (for the moment), […]

Evolutionary geneticist Alan Templeton has an article in Evolution, GENETICS AND RECENT HUMAN EVOLUTION: Starting with “mitochondrial Eve” in 1987, genetics has played an increasingly important role in studies of the last two million years of human evolution. It initially appeared that genetic data resolved the basic models of recent human evolution in favor of […]

Darwin Catholic has a post about his growing family library. Over the past 5 years the number of books in my “library” has been growing a steady but constant rate. But there are definite patterns in terms of how my collection has been piling up. I tend to keep technical books, but trade in non-technical […]