I recently finished Uri Alon‘s An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits, which I concluded about halfway through was one of the greatest textbooks I’ve ever read. No joke. It’s simply excellent. If you’re a biologist with any interest in gene regulation, read this book. If you’re a physicist or engineer with […]

The New York Times has a piece on J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist best known for his rather controversial thoughts on sexual orientation. His book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, made him something of an internet celebrity (if that’s the right word). A few paragraphs from the article pretty much sum it up: In […]

Baltic neighbours face alcohol crisis: The Estonian government plans to raise taxes on alcohol by 30% next year as the small Baltic nation of 1.3 million is struggling with a drink problem…. Finland has traditionally had very strict controls on alcohol. Strong drinks can only be bought in the state-controlled Alko shops – rather uninviting […]

Labels: Finn baiting

AMPA receptors are the major receptors for excitatory neurotransmission. There is a firm basis for the hypothesis that synaptic plasticity and thus memory is based on the increase or decrease in the number of AMPA receptors in specific synapses. AMPA receptors are actually ligand-activated ion channels made up of subunits. Sodium passing through the AMPA […]

There’s a nice review in the most recent Trends in Genetics on the use of spatially explicit models in human population genetics. As everyone knows, classic population genetic theory generally makes very restrictive assumptions about the amount of structure in a population– that is, that there is none. Or maybe a couple populations that exchange […]

I previously mentioned the Nature Genetics “Question of the Year”: What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000? A large number of responses have now been posted; most of them are actually pretty dull. I wonder if everyone really is that passionate about […]

I had what I seemed to me like an interesting thought when I read this, and I wanted to explore it further. But I have been very busy these days, and I just don’t have the spare cycles, so I’m just going to throw it out there. My biggest question is: “What am I missing?” […]

As many of our readers are aware, humans and chimpanzees are rather different, and have diverged considerably since we last shared a common ancestor a few million years ago. An interesting question in evolutionary biology is: what the hell happened? What makes us so different? Comparing the consensus genome sequences of humans and chimps shows […]

The (UK) Times seems to be getting frisky in its old age. A few days ago there was Matthew Syed’s article on race and IQ (see a few posts down), and today the Times has an article by Gregory Clark, summarising the thesis of his book Farewell to Alms. I don’t personally find the thesis […]

Rapid Erasure of Long-Term Memory Associations in the Cortex by an Inhibitor of PKM{zeta}Reut Shema, Todd Charlton Sacktor, Yadin Dudai Little is known about the neuronal mechanisms that subserve long-term memory persistence in the brain. The components of the remodeled synaptic machinery, and how they sustain the new synaptic or cellwide configuration over time, are […]

The prevailing consensus on “common” or “complex” diseases is that they result from the interplay of multiple genetic and environmental inputs. This is assumed largely because results from linkage studies were discouraging, which rules out a single, highly-penetrant gene as a possibility. There are many disease models where linkage studies could fail, however; a model […]

Apropos of the post on sexual charity, I came across this in the “readings” section of Harper’s, from a United Nations report called “The Dynamics of Honor Killings in Turkey” [pdf]: The boy was seventeen at the time and the girl about eleven. He assaulted and raped her. Then, thinking he had killed her, he […]

The UK Times today has an article by Matthew Syed with the heading Let’s not cower from the hard truth about race and IQ. The article itself is not very impressive – largely a tired rehash of arguments familiar from Gould, Lewontin, and Flynn – but it is unusual for the subject to be discussed […]

For some readers, MSNBC has a nice map which shows the rough numbers of Muslims in each European country. Labels: Islam

Remember the post Sexual Charity? This is not sexual charity, Grooming of white girls for sex is exposed as two Asian men jailed. The root: “At the point in their lives when they are ready for this sort of activity, Asians cannot go to Asian girls because it would be a terrible breach of the […]

Height, health, and development: …This paper investigates the environmental determinants of height across 43 developing countries. Unlike in rich countries, where adult height is well predicted by mortality in infancy, there is no consistent relationship across and within countries between adult height on the one hand and childhood mortality or living conditions on the other. […]

David Warsh does not like A Farewell to Alms. Warsh is the author of Knowledge and Wealth of Nations (I have the book, haven’t gotten to it, but will probably read it before Greg Clark’s book). Here is a copy of Clark’s Genetically Capitalist. Via Tyler Cowen, who is also hosting a Book Forum on […]

Let’s hope these guys come up with a better name than Flavr Savr. We have modified the flavor and aroma of tomatoes by expressing the Ocimum basilicum geraniol synthase gene under the control of the tomato ripening-specific polygalacturonase promoter. A majority of untrained taste panelists preferred the transgenic fruits over controls. Monoterpene accumulation was at […]