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Haplotype Study Says That Non-Africans Are Part Neanderthal - And Humans Interbred With Them

Haplotype Study Says That Non-Africans Are Part Neanderthal - And Humans Interbred With Them

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

New research has found that some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa.

Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa somewhere in the range of 400,000 to 800,000 years ago, evolved in what is now France, Spain, Germany and Russia, and are believed to have lived until about 30,000 years ago.  Early modern humans left Africa about 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.
CMS Sees No Gluinos - But Will Keep Looking

CMS Sees No Gluinos - But Will Keep Looking

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Blogging from the whereabouts of one of the most beautiful places of the Mediterranean, Balos Beach (see picture), I wish to draw your attention today to one fun search that CMS produced on data collected in 2010: the one for gluinos in events with six jets.
Greenpeace = Eco-Terrorists

Greenpeace = Eco-Terrorists

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Greenpeace protestors recently broke into an experimental Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) farm near Canberra and destroyed a crop of genetically modified (GM) wheat. 

The wheat's genetic makeup has been altered to improve its nutritional value. Modifying the level of resistant starch could impact where the digestive process takes place in the gut, and could have health benefits for obesity and bowel cancer.

Greenpeace has always been on the dangerous legal edge between being reputable and becoming Earth Liberation Front and the progressive zealots who work for the multi-national corporation act no differently than any paramilitary group in their efforts.
University Research Under Attack (And One Defense)

University Research Under Attack (And One Defense)

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

One of these loons who thinks all university research is worthless managed to get another op-ed to that effect published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's worth looking at, not for the article itself, but for the lengthy and emotional comment thread.
Demons In Science And Philosophy

Demons In Science And Philosophy

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Thought experiments are mental exercises, or imaginative experiments, which are often not possible to perform with current technology. They appear to be particularly popular in physics and philosophy, but are by no means limited to these two fields. There are a couple of thought experiments that employ demons. After all, an imaginary entity with awesome powers can be quite useful in a thought experiment, can’t it?

      

Three of the most famous thought experiments that center around a demon with amazing capabilities, are:


Descartes’ Evil Demon


Evolution and Wealth

Evolution and Wealth

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Greetings,
I came across this plot, and decided to post it here.



Figure: Plot that shows the correlation between the percentage of the public the accepts evolution and the GDP per capita.
(Source: Calamities of Nature)

So, what can we learn from this plot?

1. The higher the GDP per capita, the more people accept evolution (important note: it's a correlation, not necessarily a causal connection).

2. The acceptance of evolution still has a long way to go (the highest acceptance rates hover around 80%, which means that even here 1 out of every 5 people don't accept evolution!). 
Why Cheetahs Never Prosper (or, The Genetic Bottleneck Problem)

Why Cheetahs Never Prosper (or, The Genetic Bottleneck Problem)

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Between Easter’s religious reminders and a molecular evolution class overdose of population genetics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up yesterday from an unsettling dream about taking my midterm exam on Noah’s Ark. The ocean was rising, Noah was hustling animals aboard, and I was battling asthma (thanks, furry animal allergies). But what bothered me most about all this wasn’t that I’d forgotten the formula for heterozygosity. It was that there were only two animals of every kind.

Religious beliefs aside, today’s scientific consensus is that you need more than two individuals to save a species.

Diet Psychology - People Eat Less When They Have Big Forks

Diet Psychology - People Eat Less When They Have Big Forks

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Larger portions mean we eat more food but bigger bites less intuitively lead to eating less in restaurants,  according to new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The authors conducted their study in an Italian restaurant by using two sizes of forks to manipulate bite sizes and found that diners who used large forks ate less than those with small forks.

The authors then began to investigate why this finding seems to contradict earlier research on portion sizes. "We observe that diners visit the restaurant with a well-defined goal of satiating their hunger and because of this well-defined goal they are willing to invest effort and resources to satiate their hunger goal," the authors write.
I confess: I'm jealous of frogs, lizards and salamanders because of their stem cells

I confess: I'm jealous of frogs, lizards and salamanders because of their stem cells

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Frog with tail
I confess.

I'm jealous of frogs, lizards and salamanders.

Why?

Because of their stem cells and transdifferentiation potential.

Compared to them, us humans are pathetic in terms of our ability to heal ourselves, regenerate body structures, and change our bodies.

I was out taking a hike here in Yolo County today along Putah Creek.  In the last two weeks the place has been literally crawling and hopping with critters including lizards and frogs. Baby frogs and grown up frogs.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's Publicity Hound Antiquities Director, Gets Sacked

Zahi Hawass, Egypt's Publicity Hound Antiquities Director, Gets Sacked

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

Zahi Hawass, long on self-aggrandizement and short on scientific knowledge, was everything that was wrong with the latest dictatorship in Egypt.

After months of pressure from critics who attacked his credibility and accused him of having been too close to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Hawass lost his job along with about a dozen other ministers in a Cabinet reshuffle meant to ease pressure from protesters seeking to purge remnants of Mubarak's regime.
Where Does Earth's 44 Trillion Watts Of Heat Come From?

Where Does Earth's 44 Trillion Watts Of Heat Come From?

Jul 18 2011 | comment(s)

44 trillion watts of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from?

Researchers can say with 97 percent certainly that 50 percent of the heat is due to radioactive decay and other sources, like primordial heat left over from the planet's formation, must account for the rest.

Knowing that radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, in 2005 scientists in the Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) collaboration first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly.
Cephalobotics

Cephalobotics

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

The Economist has published a highly amusing (at least to me) and informative article about "the new robotics," inspired by the diversity of natural forms:
The Broad Autism Phenotype: How Family Members Often Have Some Autistic Traits

The Broad Autism Phenotype: How Family Members Often Have Some Autistic Traits

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

In the autism community, it can’t help but be noticed that a good portion of the parents of autistic kids deal with the same kinds
Nutmeg Liquor

Nutmeg Liquor

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

“I am going Nuts” introduced a misunderstood gem, the Nutmeg, and mentioned the problem of the nuts being very diverse, as you can see in the picture below, and thus a little difficult to dose. One solution is to produce liquor, or in other words, perform an extraction.


Halved nutmeg nuts: Size, oil content, and so on, differ a lot between nuts. Also notice the very black, gray and extremely white nuts, who seem to have different kinds of fungi attacking them. The nuts look pretty much the same from the outside!

Locust Swarms And Twitter

Locust Swarms And Twitter

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

Twitter and Facebook have been studied extensively and have provided some insights into the formation and maintenance of human social networks. But could this approach be adapted to gain understanding of swarming behavior in animals, say, locusts?

Lolplankton

Lolplankton

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

A comment thread on my last post has gotten me thinking about the summer of 2009. I lived in La Jolla for a couple of months, sorting baby squid out of old preserved plankton tows, and then trying to identify them. I posted extensively about the experience on my other blog, The Cephalopodiatrist, and though I started this blog shortly thereafter, none of that summer material ever made it here.
How Rice Might Easily Adapt To Climate Change

How Rice Might Easily Adapt To Climate Change

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

Rice accounts for nearly half the daily calories for the world's population but crops are at risk from tsunamis and tidal surges and perhaps future unknown effects of climate change.  

But naturally occurring fungi called endophytes might come to the rescue. 

In an effort to explore ways to increase the adaptability of rice to disasters that have already led to rice shortages, USGS researchers and their colleagues colonized two commercial varieties of rice with the spores of fungi that exist naturally within native coastal (salt-tolerant) and geothermal (heat-tolerant) plants. 
Strong El Niño Could Bring Increased Sea Levels To US East Coast

Strong El Niño Could Bring Increased Sea Levels To US East Coast

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

An unusual number of destructive storm surges along the East Coast during the 2009-2010 El Niño winter could be a taste of things to come - with more destructive storm surges in future El Niño years, according to a new study by NOAA.

El Niño conditions are characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific that normally peak during the Northern Hemisphere 'cool season.' They occur every three to five years with stronger events generally occurring every 10-15 years. El Niño conditions have important consequences for global weather patterns, and within the U.S., often cause wetter-than-average conditions and cooler-than-normal temperatures across much of the South.
Jakobshavn Isbrae - Greenland Glacier Has Always Changed With The Climate

Jakobshavn Isbrae - Greenland Glacier Has Always Changed With The Climate

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

New research on Jakobshavn Isbrae, a tongue of ice extending out to sea from Greenland's west coast, shows that large, marine-calving glaciers don't just shrink rapidly in response to global warming, they also grow at a remarkable pace during periods of global cooling.  Glaciers change.

Through an analysis of adjacent lake sediments and plant fossils, the researchers determined that the glacier, which retreated about 40 kilometers inland between 1850 and 2010, expanded outward at a similar pace about 200 years ago, during a time of cooler temperatures known as the Little Ice Age.
Help Solve Global Warming By Using More Wood

Help Solve Global Warming By Using More Wood

Jul 17 2011 | comment(s)

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow so forests are a completely natural way to offset climate change - but rather than let them passively sit there, the amount of carbon dioxide they extract from the atmosphere could be boosted by 400 percent if wood was harvested and used in smaller buildings instead of the steel and concrete that require a lot more fossil fuels during manufacturing, producing carbon dioxide.